PDF

Some useful PDF editing (and search) commands

  • Insert pages with interleave: pdftk A=input_odd_pages.pdf B=input_even_pages.pdf shuffle A B output collated.pdf(from the pdftk package)
  • Split an A2-sized PDF into two A3 pages for printing (no overlap): pdfposter -m A3 -p A2 Periodic-Table_A2.pdf Periodic-Table_2xA3.pdf
  • Split an arbitrary-sized PDF into A3 pages for printing at 100% size (= 1), no overlap: pdfposter -m A3 -s1 Poster.pdf Poster_split_to_A3.pdf

ps2pdf versus pstill and password protection of pdf documents

While reading about ps2pdf (which is just a commandline front-end to ghostscript), I realized that despite its simple appearance, ps2pdf has almost all capabilities of Acrobat 5. ps2pdf14 outputs Acrobat 5-compatible files. According to the documentation strong password protection should be possible, however, I never managed with that.

In theory the following commands should work:

-sOwnerPassword= and -sUserPassword=

In order to set the key length to 128 you have to use
ps2pdf14 -dEncryptionR=3 -dKeylength=128

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