pdfbooktool

Tool for converting PDFs into a format ready for printing A6 books.


License
GPL-2.0+
Install
pip install pdfbooktool==0.1.5

Documentation

pdfbooktool

A python 3 tool for use in creating your own books.

There is currently only support for handling books in A6 format, printing on A4 paper. However, the input PDF can be any size.

This package installs a script called 'booktool' and this is what you would actually use for preparing your PDFs.

Usage

In a terminal, navigate to the directory of your PDF, then do:

$ booktool input-file.pdf

This will output a couple of intermediary files (which will be removed once the script is finished running) into the working directory, and eventually a file called 'out.pdf'. This new file is a reordered PDF with A4 dimensions, ready for double-sided printing. Once printed, you can cut the sheets in half and bind them together using a technique called "perfect binding". There exist several videos on youtube that explains how to do this.

A good open-source tool for creating suitable PDFs is 'scribus'.

Requirements

This package requires python 3, and the library 'PyPDF2' to work, the install process should install this automatically if needed.

Installation

The most convenient way to install pdfbooktool is with pip. Since the script currently doesn't seem to work on Windows, installation instructions are only given for linux:

Make sure you have python 3 installed, then open a terminal and type:

$ sudo pip3 install pdfbooktool

This should automatically install the tool, and it's dependencies.

Running under windows

Running this script under Windows has barely been testet. Neither PyPDF2 nor pdfbooktool should use any features that are platform specific, however it doesn't seem to currently work under Windows 7. Help with further testing and making it work, is wanted.