The One with the Thoughts of Frans

For PostScript, Debian has a nice collection of tools in the psutils package, including psbooks and psnup. But since I do most stuff in PDF, I figured I’d skip a step and look for something similar for PDFs: PDFjam is just the thing.

In Debian Squeeze you have to install the pdfjam package separately, but in newer versions of Debian and Ubuntu it comes as part of the texlive-extra-utils package.

By default it turns the whole file into one big booklet. If you want multiple sections for binding, you’ll have to disable that behavior. The --signature option allows you to specify a multiple of four for the size of the sections.

pdfbook --booklet false --signature 16 your-file.pdf