[reportlab-users] ANN: pdfnup 0.3.0

[Dinu Gherman]

Andy Robinson:


> I thought the Adobe "Document Structuring Conventions" apply

> to postscript, not PDF?  Since a PS program is a general purpose

> program, people needed to follow conventions (like separating

> each page between magic comments) to make it easy to

> parse postscript.    PDF doesn't need this since a badly

> structured PDF file just won't parse, and is inherently broken

> into pages.  Did you just mean to say "The input PDF file should  

> comply with

> [insert version of PDF spec here]"?


I had just taken the quote from the psnup man page and adapted
it to PDF. I thought about dropping the sentence you wonder
about, but then it would have been too short for a citation,
I thought, so I left it in. You're right, of course. And here
is the full About section of pdfnup, just to reduce further
misunderstanding:

   Pdfnup is a Python module and command-line tool for layouting
   multiple pages per sheet of a PDF document. Using it you can
   take a PDF document and create a new PDF document from it
   where each page contains a number of minimized pages from the
   original PDF file.

   Right now pdfnup should be used on documents with all pages
   the same size, and half square page numbers per sheet work
   best on paper sizes of the ISO A series.

   Basically, `pdfnup` wrapps `pyPdf <http://pypi.python.org/pypi/ 
pyPdf>`_,
   a package written by Mathieu Fenniak, which does not provide tools
   like this for using the core functionality easily from the command-
   line or from a Python module.

In fact, I wrote it because none of my printer drivers has
support for half square values of n (n > 2), like 8, which is
very convenient with paper sizes in ISO A formats.

I should also add that pdfnup is much inspired by a similar,
but simpler and unpublished tool written by Henning von Bargen.
I'll add this to the README in the next release.

Regards,

Dinu