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I've got a PDF file, which has A5 as internal page size. This is also shown by evince:

evince screenshot

A5 is half A4, so I thought it should be possible to print two pages of this PDF on one A4 page, such that they have the correct size. But choosing to print two pages per sheet actually shrinks each page to half its size, so they end up being A6-sized. It looks like this:

small pdf

I could use the zoom option to get "acceptable" results, but this seems a bit hacky and I had to experiment to get the right size (hint: 200% is to large, not sure why though).

Is there a clean way to print this PDF on A4, preferably from the usual printing dialog?

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4
  • Does this reference help? superuser.com/questions/318543/…
    – graham
    May 16, 2019 at 18:36
  • and is it possible to resize the pages in the pdf to A4?
    – graham
    May 16, 2019 at 18:47
  • @Graham Thanks for this reference, I think I succeded using psnup. I will write further details in an answer. Still it would be nice if that thing was possible without using additional tools from the command line. About resizing: I could use A4 in my latex, but I would like to write this (my master's thesis) in A5, and just wanted to take a look at how is is printed, if the font size was appropriate etc.
    – red_trumpet
    May 16, 2019 at 18:56
  • Similar: superuser.com/questions/1787969/…
    – cweiske
    Sep 9 at 13:04

3 Answers 3

Reset to default
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One way to solve this is using command line tools, as mentioned by Graham in the comments. This can be done as follows:

pdftops DOC.pdf DOC.ps

converts the pdf-file to a PostScript (ps) file. Then

psnup -pa4 -Pa5 -2 DOC.ps DOC_2.ps

creates a new PostScript file, where each A4 page contains two of the original A5 pages. After that use

ps2pdf DOC_2.ps DOC_2.pdf

to convert the PostScript file back to pdf.

If necessary, after converting to ps one might also use psselect to select only a part of the pages.

I'm still not happy that this is not possible from the standard printing dialog, so I don't consider this a real answer, but rather a bandaid.

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  • Did you try using boomaga (virtual printer driver)?
    – FedKad
    May 16, 2019 at 19:54
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The texlive-extra-utils packages has a a5toa4 tool that does exactly what you want.

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-1

Bookletimposer does this perfectly (and it can reorder the pages to create a booklet). It might be worth a try.

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