Merging two a5 pages into a singe a4 page (without using pdfnup)
I am using Dompdf to generate A5 pdf documents from a html template and Pdfnup (Part of Pdfjam) to combine them into a nice single A4 sheet, which helps saving some paper when printing :)
# Generate an a5 pdf
php dompdf.php mytemplate.html -p 'A5' -f a5doc.pdf
# combine two copies of the generated A5 into a single A4 page
pdfnup a5doc.pdf a5doc.pdf --nup '2x1'
This works just fine; though the second step forces me to install a huge amount of dependencies (i.e. Tex-Latex, pdftex, ecc.) and would clutter my production server. I am wondering if is there any way to combine the generated documents without actually using Pdfnup. For example, is there any way of doing this with pdftk?
Thank you in advance!
Answer
On Debian/Ubuntu, I managed to merge 2xA5 to 1xA4 for printing, using simple commands, by:
# apt-get install ghostscript pdftk psutils
pdftk A=A5-1.pdf B=A5-2.pdf cat A1 B1 output - \
| pdf2ps -dLanguageLevel=3 - - \
| psnup -2 -Pa5 -pa4 \
| ps2pdf -dCompatibility=1.4 - A4.pdf