On the Royal Mail website is a "handy" price guide available as a PDF:
http://www.royalmail.com/sites/default/files/Royal-Mail-Our-Prices-March-201...
It's only actually "handy" if you have a weird printer (or at least very unusual sized paper). I'm not sure what size/shape you'd call it but it would go into a DL envelope without folding...
What I'd like to do is split the individual pages out and merge them to get three (maybe four) "pages" per A4 sheet so that I can print it on my very normal A4 printer.
Suggestions?
This is an annual headache and I'm fed up with a different manual solution every year.
On 15/05/17 13:55, Mark Rogers wrote:
On the Royal Mail website is a "handy" price guide available as a PDF:
http://www.royalmail.com/sites/default/files/Royal-Mail-Our-Prices-March-201...
It's only actually "handy" if you have a weird printer (or at least very unusual sized paper). I'm not sure what size/shape you'd call it but it would go into a DL envelope without folding...
What I'd like to do is split the individual pages out and merge them to get three (maybe four) "pages" per A4 sheet so that I can print it on my very normal A4 printer.
Suggestions?
Try https://www.pdftoword.com/
Nev
On Mon, 15 May 2017 15:26:15 +0100 Nev Young alug@nevilley.org.uk allegedly wrote:
On 15/05/17 13:55, Mark Rogers wrote:
On the Royal Mail website is a "handy" price guide available as a PDF:
http://www.royalmail.com/sites/default/files/Royal-Mail-Our-Prices-March-201...
It's only actually "handy" if you have a weird printer (or at least very unusual sized paper). I'm not sure what size/shape you'd call it but it would go into a DL envelope without folding...
What I'd like to do is split the individual pages out and merge them to get three (maybe four) "pages" per A4 sheet so that I can print it on my very normal A4 printer.
Suggestions?
Try https://www.pdftoword.com/
Nev
Arrrgh! That means you have to pass your PDF doc to a third party site. Fine if you don't care about that, but why not try pdftk?
Quote "If PDF is electronic paper, then pdftk is an electronic stapler-remover, hole-punch, binder, secret-decoder-ring, and X-Ray-glasses. Pdftk is a simple tool for doing everyday things with PDF documents." Unquote
It should be in your repository.
--------------------------------------------------------------------- Mick Morgan gpg fingerprint: FC23 3338 F664 5E66 876B 72C0 0A1F E60B 5BAD D312 http://baldric.net
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On 15 May 2017 at 15:52, mick mbm@rlogin.net wrote:
Quote "If PDF is electronic paper, then pdftk is an electronic stapler-remover, hole-punch, binder, secret-decoder-ring, and X-Ray-glasses. Pdftk is a simple tool for doing everyday things with PDF documents." Unquote
OK, I've had a play.
$ pdftk Royal-Mail-Our-Prices-March-2017_0.pdf burst
.. created 16 separate single page PDFs (pg_0001.pdf up), each of which is 8.27" x 3.9" in dimension.
How do I cram multiple pg_xxxx onto a single A4?
Mark
On Mon, 15 May 2017 16:21:44 +0100 Mark Rogers mark@more-solutions.co.uk allegedly wrote:
On 15 May 2017 at 15:52, mick mbm@rlogin.net wrote:
Quote "If PDF is electronic paper, then pdftk is an electronic stapler-remover, hole-punch, binder, secret-decoder-ring, and X-Ray-glasses. Pdftk is a simple tool for doing everyday things with PDF documents." Unquote
OK, I've had a play.
$ pdftk Royal-Mail-Our-Prices-March-2017_0.pdf burst
.. created 16 separate single page PDFs (pg_0001.pdf up), each of which is 8.27" x 3.9" in dimension.
How do I cram multiple pg_xxxx onto a single A4?
So - here's an idea (which worked for me). Open the original PDF in any PDF viewer (I used the default Mate desktop Document Viewer) and resize the image on screen to something sensible. Then use a screenshot grabber to snap images of the actual bits you want and paste them into a document. Depending upon resolution you might get three or four images to a page.
Then print.
(Though actually, even though the Post Office document is a wierd size, I had no problem printing individual pages from Document Viewer to my printer.)
--------------------------------------------------------------------- Mick Morgan gpg fingerprint: FC23 3338 F664 5E66 876B 72C0 0A1F E60B 5BAD D312 http://baldric.net
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On 15 May 2017 at 19:36, mick mbm@rlogin.net wrote:
So - here's an idea (which worked for me). Open the original PDF in any PDF viewer (I used the default Mate desktop Document Viewer) and resize the image on screen to something sensible. Then use a screenshot grabber to snap images of the actual bits you want and paste them into a document. Depending upon resolution you might get three or four images to a page.
Yeah, that's pretty much what I've done in the past, but it's the same task every year and I thought I'd try and be a bit clever this year and try to script it.
Not successfully though :-)
(Though actually, even though the Post Office document is a wierd size, I had no problem printing individual pages from Document Viewer to my printer.)
Agreed, although I tend to print all of it (or almost all of it) and having 16 pages each >50% whitespace bugs me enough to try and fix it.
I suspect that extracting the pages as images then using ImageMagick or similar to combine them into larger images (3 or 4 original pages per image), then recombining into a new PDF, would probably be the "simplest" scriptable option.
Thanks all for the tips though. pdftk was new to me and looks like a useful addition to the list of "must haves".
On 15 May 13:55, Mark Rogers wrote:
On the Royal Mail website is a "handy" price guide available as a PDF:
http://www.royalmail.com/sites/default/files/Royal-Mail-Our-Prices-March-201...
It's only actually "handy" if you have a weird printer (or at least very unusual sized paper). I'm not sure what size/shape you'd call it but it would go into a DL envelope without folding...
What I'd like to do is split the individual pages out and merge them to get three (maybe four) "pages" per A4 sheet so that I can print it on my very normal A4 printer.
Suggestions?
This is an annual headache and I'm fed up with a different manual solution every year.
The pages happen to be 1/3rd A4 size, so, something like:
pdfjam Royal-Mail-Our-Prices-March-2017_0.pdf --a4paper --landscape --nup 3x1 --outfile ~/test.pdf
Should do what you're after.
Thanks,
On 17 May 2017 at 14:35, Brett Parker iDunno@sommitrealweird.co.uk wrote:
The pages happen to be 1/3rd A4 size, so, something like:
pdfjam Royal-Mail-Our-Prices-March-2017_0.pdf --a4paper --landscape --nup 3x1 --outfile ~/test.pdf
Should do what you're after.
That's damn near perfect, thanks!
The only tweak I needed was that the original contains 16 pages, with the last page being useless but preventing it fitting on 5 pages.
Googling suggested that $ pdfjam Royal-Mail-Our-Prices-March-2017_0.pdf 1-15 --a4paper --landscape --nup 3x1 --outfile ~/test.pdf
.. would do what I wanted but it didn't - the result wasn't a valid PDF. So I tried two steps: $ pdfjam Royal-Mail-Our-Prices-March-2017_0.pdf 1-15 --outfile ~/test.pdf $ pdfjam ~/test.pdf --a4paper --landscape --nup 3x1 --outfile ~/test2.pdf
.. which extracted the right pages but screwed up the layout.
In the end I combined knowledge from elsewhere in this thread to get: $ pdftk Royal-Mail-Our-Prices-March-2017_0.pdf cat 1-15 output tmp.pdf $ pdfjam tmp.pdf --a4paper --landscape --nup 3x1 --outfile result.pdf
The result is spot on but I'd be interested to know where I went wrong trying to do this in a single step with pdfjam?
On 17 May 15:19, Mark Rogers wrote:
On 17 May 2017 at 14:35, Brett Parker iDunno@sommitrealweird.co.uk wrote:
The pages happen to be 1/3rd A4 size, so, something like:
pdfjam Royal-Mail-Our-Prices-March-2017_0.pdf --a4paper --landscape --nup 3x1 --outfile ~/test.pdf
Should do what you're after.
That's damn near perfect, thanks!
The only tweak I needed was that the original contains 16 pages, with the last page being useless but preventing it fitting on 5 pages.
Googling suggested that $ pdfjam Royal-Mail-Our-Prices-March-2017_0.pdf 1-15 --a4paper --landscape --nup 3x1 --outfile ~/test.pdf
.. would do what I wanted but it didn't - the result wasn't a valid PDF.
Really? I just ran:
pdfjam Royal-Mail-Our-Prices-March-2017_0.pdf '1-15' --a4paper --landscape --nup 3x1 --outfile ~/temp.pdf
and it seemed to generate something that was perfectly fine in evince.
So I tried two steps: $ pdfjam Royal-Mail-Our-Prices-March-2017_0.pdf 1-15 --outfile ~/test.pdf $ pdfjam ~/test.pdf --a4paper --landscape --nup 3x1 --outfile ~/test2.pdf
.. which extracted the right pages but screwed up the layout.
In the end I combined knowledge from elsewhere in this thread to get: $ pdftk Royal-Mail-Our-Prices-March-2017_0.pdf cat 1-15 output tmp.pdf $ pdfjam tmp.pdf --a4paper --landscape --nup 3x1 --outfile result.pdf
The result is spot on but I'd be interested to know where I went wrong trying to do this in a single step with pdfjam?
Dunno, unless it really does parse '1-15' different to 1-15, which would be odd indeed!
Really, looking at how that booklet is supposed to be folded, it looks like "all the fun" to actually print it in a way where you can fold it correctly in to the actual leaflet.
Cheers,
On 18 May 2017 at 11:22, Brett Parker iDunno@sommitrealweird.co.uk wrote:
Really? I just ran:
pdfjam Royal-Mail-Our-Prices-March-2017_0.pdf '1-15' --a4paper --landscape --nup 3x1 --outfile ~/temp.pdf
and it seemed to generate something that was perfectly fine in evince.
Odd. I just repeated the exercise (with and without quoting the 1-15) and both results were fine.
Thanks for testing and correcting me.
I think I will be using pdfjam a lot more in future!
On Wed, 17 May 2017 14:35:49 +0100 Brett Parker iDunno@sommitrealweird.co.uk allegedly wrote:
This is an annual headache and I'm fed up with a different manual solution every year.
The pages happen to be 1/3rd A4 size, so, something like:
pdfjam Royal-Mail-Our-Prices-March-2017_0.pdf --a4paper --landscape --nup 3x1 --outfile ~/test.pdf
Should do what you're after.
That's cool! I'd never heard of pdfjam before - and it appears to come with a lot of other related useful utilities in a package called "texlive-extra-utils".
Thanks for the tip.
Mick --------------------------------------------------------------------- Mick Morgan gpg fingerprint: FC23 3338 F664 5E66 876B 72C0 0A1F E60B 5BAD D312 http://baldric.net
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Dragging up an old thread, a quick summary: Royal Mail create a pricing sheet which is absolutely useless for printing. You can see the original here: https://www.royalmail.com/sites/default/files/royal-mail-our-prices-25-march...
A couple of years ago, with a lot of help here, I managed to reformat it to something useful thus: sudo apt install texlive-extra-utils pdfjam Royal-Mail-Our-Prices-March-2017_0.pdf '1-15' --a4paper --landscape --nup 3x1 --outfile ~/temp.pdf
However the PDF format has changed and I'm stuck again.
Part of the issue is that the first and last pages are different dimensions (and there's only 9 pages now). But I have got something useful with: pdfjam royal-mail-our-prices-25-march-2019-46305575.pdf '3-8' --a4paper --landscape --nup 3x2 --outfile nice.pdf
But that gets me everything onto one A4 sheet so you need very good eyes to read it.
If you repeat the above exercise you'll see that the result would naturally split down the middle to create 2xA4, but that means splitting some pages in half. But I'm not really fussy as long as I'm not wasting lots of paper with whitespace with some content dumped in the middle of it. Anyone with more PDF layout skills fancy trying to get something more useful than I have achieved?
Mark
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Brett Parker -
Mark Rogers -
mick -
Nev Young