Add margin to PDF file when merging using PDFTK or similar
I have a large collection of half-page sized PDF cut-sheets that are held in a folder on my Linux server. A user to the site will want to create a booklet from a subset of these. The booklet will be bound therefore the even pages of the collection will want more margin on the right side and the odd pages will want more margin on the left side. There can be up to 200 pages in a collection out of a universe of 500 pages so I don't want to regenerate each page to set the margin of it. It would take too much of the servers time to run the content through the DOMPDF. Just building the document using PDFTK is fast.
I'd like to merge the document with PDFTK from a centered PDF file and add the appropriate margin for the odd or even page.
If not PDFTK then is there another tool that might do the job?
Answer
If you use ubuntu, you can install pdfcrop:
sudo apt-get install -y pdfcrop
Despite its name, pdfcrop has the option to add margins:
pdfcrop --margin '29 0 29 0' input.pdf output.pdf
(Note: the unit is bp. 72 bp = 1 inch. 29 bp is approximately 1 cm.)
Then, use pdfjam to do the offset trick for the right and left pages.
pdfjam --twoside --offset '1cm 0cm' file.pdf
Note: pdfcrop does have problems with some pdf files. (!!! Error: Ghostscript exited with error code 139!).