On 30/05/12 11:05, Chris Green wrote:

The Royal Mail used to provide a neat PDF file which fitted A4 to show their postage prices.

The latest version though is a 'booklet' so I can't see any way to actually print it on an A4 printer.

This is the link to the PDF:- http://c435158.r58.cf3.rackcdn.com/Royal_Mail_Our_Prices.pdf

Can anyone tell me how to split it up into printable pages? I've tried ImageMagick's convert but that didn't default to what I wanted, maybe I need some more options to tell it what to do.

On my system (Mandriva), there is a program called pdfedit and I have just used it to load up the file. One option is to save the page as a graphic so that might be a way round your problem as you could then hack the graphic. Seems a bit of an overkill to me though.

One of the problems with the RM pdf is the size. It's bigger than A3 in length but not width. According to okular, it's 574.001 x 210 mm while A3 is 420x210. So however you print it, you'll have duplication of parts of the page, that is unless you have a continuous printer or you can hack the file as above.

On 30/05/12 21:30, nev young wrote:

On my ubuntu system I just saved it as a pdf then opened it in gimp and chopped it up. A bit tedious but it works.

On my ubuntu system I just hit "print" and got it printed just fine, shrunk to fit the page. Am I missing something?

Agreed that RM should do better (not sure if it's good that this is just incompetence rather than Windows-bias, as it's the same issue on all platforms).

Maybe they just hope that people will print it at the right size on some oversized printer, refuse to fold it, then post it at the silly rate of £2.70 just because it won't even fit into their "large letter" category... (Actually if you think that a company may print it at the right size on (say) an A3 printer, cut it to size, laminate it, then distribute it out to all their offices, then this starts to look quite shrewd!)

On 31/05/12 12:48, Chris Green wrote:

Could you actually read it at that text size though? Yes, I could print it like that too but it would be of little use.

I could (I tested it), but I accept that doesn't mean everyone else would be able to. I was just checking you weren't having a problem scaling to fit or similar.

As I typed this email, the postman delivered a Viking Direct mini-catalogue. As I still have the RM printout on my desk I compared font sizes between the scaled-down printout and the "full-size" catalogue and they're broadly similar sizes (except the small print on the RM one, which is very, er, small!)

[I printed to a laser printer, which despite being old, clunky, and giving pretty awful quality generally, probably does do quite a good job of giving decent definition on the reduced font. I haven't tried to an inkjet which may not be as readable.]

Returning to the original question though, I just tried: convert -density 300 Royal_Mail_Our_Prices.pdf rm.jpeg .. which gave me the two pages from the PDF as rm-0.jpeg and rm-1.jpeg, either of which I could then crop to suit printing. (Experiment with the density (in dpi) to get the best results - 300dpi is probably higher than necessary.)