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I have a house plan in A3 format.
In this plan I have the ground floor and the floor.
I need to print this A3 in two A4 documents (one with the ground floor and on with the floor).
So, i need to cut this A3 in two A4 without breaking the scale of the plans.
I don't know if I am being clear...

So I d like to know if there is a linux software that could easily achieve that.

If anyone knows... Thanks

2 Answers 2

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Surprisingly simple:

sudo apt install pdfposter
pdfposter -s1 a3-input.pdf a4-output.pdf

pdfposter defaults to output to A4 by default (see man pdfposter for other options). All we have to do is tell it not to scale (with -s1) and it'll figure things out for itself.

Note that you'll need a printer that can print right up to the edges.

8
  • it's telling me : pdfposter: error: The input-file is either currupt or no PDF at all. Nov 12, 2015 at 10:01
  • Is the input file a PDF? If not, convert it to one. How you do that really depends on the type of document but most editors have a print to PDF function directly (or via the pdf printer).
    – Oli
    Nov 12, 2015 at 10:10
  • I found a tool to repair the pdf, it worked. Thx for your help Nov 12, 2015 at 10:11
  • 2
    I have an extra white page at the beginning of the splitted pdf. Any idea ?
    – Tarass
    Oct 1, 2016 at 10:49
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    This command line assume the input is A3. For a generic input size generating multiple A4, here is the command : pdfposter any-input.pdf -p A3 a4-output.pdf
    – Tweepy
    Nov 25, 2019 at 9:41
0

Do you plan to glue those A4 pages together to form an A3 page? In that case, two A4 pages will not be enough because of the overlap between the pages.

Even if you are not gluing the pages together, you would need a printer that can print borderless documents or otherwise the areas where your big A3 was split will not get printed.

Since I didn't like some properties of pdfposter (like that it's not easy to add an overlap to glue pages or that it would output extra white pages) I wrote my own GUI tool called plakativ which should make it much easier to split an input PDF files across multiple pages to form a larger poster. You can grab it here:

https://pypi.org/project/plakativ/

If you are on Linux you can install it with pip. Windows executables are also regularly built on AppVeyor CI: https://ci.appveyor.com/project/josch/plakativ/build/artifacts

The source code is hosted here: https://gitlab.mister-muffin.de/josch/plakativ

plakativ

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