pdfbooktool 0.1.2

Tool for formatting A6 PDFs into A4 ready for printing A6 books.

A python 3 tool for use in creating your own books.

There is currently only support for handling books in A6 format, printing on A4 paper.

This package installs a script called ‘booktool’ and this is what you would actually use for preparing your PDFs.

Usage

Navigate to the directory of your PDF, then do:

$ booktool A6-file.pdf

This will output a couple of intermediary files (which will be removed once the script is finished running) into the working directory, and eventually a file called ‘out.pdf’. This new file is a reordered PDF in A4 dimensions, ready for double-sided printing. Once printed, you can cut the sheets in half and bind them together.

The easiest way is to fold the cut sheets and using the ‘perfect binding’ technique. There exist several videos on youtube that explains how to do this.

A good open-source tool for creating suitable PDFs is ‘scribus’.

Requirements

This package requires ‘PyPDF2’ to work, the install process should install this automatically if needed.

The script currently only works with PDF-files that have A6 dimensions, trying to run it with anything else will result in an error.

Running under windows

Running this script under Windows has not been tested, but neither PyPDF2 nor pdfbooktool uses any features that are platform specific.