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I have a lot of PDF files with 1 to 4 pages each. I need a solution which automatically generates a new file for each of these files. The new files should contain the content of the original files twice (i.e. pages 1 through to the end, followed by the same pages in the same order again).

How do I accomplish this?

Karan
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Marc
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    Please clarify, we cannot read your mind. What bill? You want to generate a new pdf file that contains every page of the original twice? In what order? Do you want page 1a followed by page 1b or do you want all 4 pages first and then all four pages again? What Operating system are you using? What tool do you use to create the pdfs? – terdon May 28 '13 at 15:52

8 Answers8

20

Solution for Windows using PDFtk (which you seem to be using as per your tags):

This will result in a PDF with pages 1-end followed by 1-end again:

pdftk in.pdf cat 1-end 1-end output out.pdf

If you want each page to be duplicated together (as in 1,1,2,2,...), use the following batch file:

@echo off
set pages=
setlocal enabledelayedexpansion
for /f "tokens=2" %%a in ('pdftk in.pdf dump_data ^| find /i "NumberOfPages"') do for /l %%b in (1,1,%%a) do set pages=!pages! %%b %%b
pdftk in.pdf cat!pages! output out.pdf
Karan
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  • Thanks a lot: "pdftk in.pdf cat 1-end 1-end output out.pdf" exactly does what I need. The only thing missing is a loop that takes all pdf files from a directory and creates all the new files.Thanx a lot for helping me again. I'll be grateful and invite my wife for a dinner with the time saved ;-))) – Marc May 29 '13 at 19:58
  • @Marc: The loop is easily achieved. Just go to the directory with the PDFs and at the command prompt type `for %a in (*.pdf) do @pdftk "%~a" cat 1-end 1-end output "%~na (Duplicated)%~xa"`. For each **in.pdf** (name can be anything), this will result in a corresponding **in (Duplicated).pdf**. Enjoy your dinner and don't forget to accept the answer (click the green check mark to the left) if it helped you! – Karan May 30 '13 at 14:06
  • infinete thanks to you - you have saved my life! I am very very grateful for your help! – Marc May 30 '13 at 19:19
2

I might give you a better solution if you answer the questions in my comment but for the sake of your wife, here are couple of suggestions.

ImageMagick is a cross-platform command line tool for image manipulation. Once you install it, you should be able to use its convert tool to do what you want. The details depend on your operating system. I am assuming you want two copies of the entire file, not each page doubled.

  1. Linux/OSX/Unix etc

    for n in *pdf; do convert -density 150 "$n" "$n" "$n"; done

    This will overwrite the existing files, you may want to backup first.

  2. Windows. This may well be slightly wrong, I don't use Windows so I cannot test it but the general idea should be something like this

    for %f in (*.pdf) do (convert.exe %f %f %f)
terdon
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  • Your `for` loop is missing the `done` and `$n` should probably be quoted. Maybe I'm missing how `convert` works, but what does `convert` do when you pass three times the same file? I can't test it right now. – slhck May 28 '13 at 20:51
  • Thanks @slhck, you're right on both counts as usual. The general convert format is `convert infile1 infile2 ... infileN outfile`. So, if you pass it the same file three times it will take it twice as input and then write to the same file as output. That one I _did_ test :). – terdon May 28 '13 at 21:29
  • Oh, cool, then I learned something as well :) – slhck May 28 '13 at 21:30
  • Sounds good to me. Thanks a lot. The comment above: I gave that one the first try and it worked perfectly, only the right loop I am still seraching for.... could you help me again? Many thanks in advance! – Marc May 30 '13 at 05:50
  • @Marc sorry, I'm not sure what you mean. Which comment? Which loop? The windows or the bash one? – terdon May 30 '13 at 14:16
2

If you want each page to be duplicated together (as in 1,1,2,2,...) on Linux, this script will do it: 

#!/bin/bash
INPUTFILE=$*
PAGENUM=`pdftk ${INPUTFILE} dump_data | grep NumberOfPages | cut -d : -f 2  | cut -d " " -f 2`
PAGES=`seq 1 ${PAGENUM}`
DUPAGES=`for i in ${PAGES} ; do echo $i $i | tr "\n" " " ; done`
OUTPUT=`basename ${INPUTFILE} .pdf`.dup.pdf
pdftk ${INPUTFILE} cat ${DUPAGES} output ${OUTPUT}
Seegras
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For duplicating pages in a 4 page pdf (1,1,2,2,3,3,4,4) in Linux with pdftk already installed this entry worked for me in a C shell script:

pdftk output.pdf cat 1 1 2 2 3 3 4 4 output out.pdf
wrotenberry
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1

To duplicate a pdf multiple times into a new pdf, I prefer pdfjam. In Windows this might be hard to come by, but in Linux (or via wsl in Windows) the texlive-extra-utils package should be easy to install.

I use it like this:

pdfjam input.pdf 1,1 --a4paper --scale 0.97 --pdftitle Title... --outfile output.pdf

The advantage of pdfjam over pdftk: the resulting pdf is much smaller. A duplicated result without duplicating the actual data!

Michel de Ruiter
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0

For duplicating all pages (1,1,2,2,...) of a pdf file (named in.pdf), you can shuffle it with itself (using pdftk):

pdftk A=in.pdf B=in.pdf shuffle A B output out.pdf
user1545247
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If you have pdftk not installed, but poppler-utils, then use this command:

for f in *
do
    pdfjoin $f $f
done

This is especially relevant on Fedora 21, where pdftk is not available in the repository any more.

Constantin
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Simple use pdfunite. This can probably be further simplified with more scripting knowledge.

Be aware that the last argument is the resulting file. If you forget that then this file will be overwritten.

pdfunite 1.pdf 2.pdf 3.pdf 4.pdf result.pdf
pdfunite result.pdf result.pdf result.pdf 3-times-result.pdf
keiki
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