Some large size PDF documents like CAD drawings or posters have excessive white space around the actual image, or around the intended drawing border. This occurs when the PDF's were created on a page size that was larger than the actual document. Printing of these PDF files is often problematic; when the output must be enlarged, the white space is enlarged as well. Besides it is often difficult to position the image on paper, or it simply costs more paper and means extra work afterwards for manual trimming and folding. This tool is based on iTextSharp and uses GhostScript to find the extents of the imaged area.

The latest version (July '08) offers these features:

• Automatically crop multiple single- and multipage PDF's
• Optionally crop all pages of multipage documents to the minimum common imaged size
• Optionally keep some white space around the image
• Optionally crop to a standard page size (currently DIN-sizes)
• Note that it does not crop the white space from raster images
• Crop on the trimbox (if defined in the PDF)
• Drag and drop
• Select output folder

GhostScript and .NET 2.0 must be available (if this is not the case, install these first). Then unzip the .EXE file from the downloaded ZIP-archive; place it in a folder and create a shortcut to the executable. Click "Configure" to tell where the GhostScript binaries are (typically C:\Program Files\GS\GS8.6x\bin).

Experimenting with iTextSharp (a C# port of Paulo Soares' and Bruno Lowagie's excellent iText PDF library for Java), I created this simple tool for the most basic imposition needs.

This application requires that .NET 2.0 is installed (can be obtained from Microsoft's site for free).

Like with my other tools "installing" means no more than that you unzip the .EXE from the ZIP-archive to a folder and create a shortcut to it.

Gimposition works straightforward. Just run the executable (click on it's icon or shortcut). Select the file with the button, or drag and drop the file to the form. Select what you want to do - prepare for 2-up printing - prepare for booklet printing or place two equal copies side by side. Then press "Action".

Ever need an overview of a bunch of PDF's or digital photo's? This tool takes a number of PDF's or raster images (JPG, PNG, BMP, TIFF) and creates a PDF document with reduced size images of the input files, arranged in an array of rows and columns. Filenames are printed near the images to help you identify what's what. This is yet another PDF tool that I made as an exercise using iTextSharp. It is created in in Turbo Delphi DotNet. If you're interested in programming yourself: the free (!) Explorer Edition that I use is available here. PDFCatalogger requires .NET 1.1.

Somebody complained that he had to scale hundreds of files by 50%, but he had no adequate tool. This tool does that. Scales many PDF's in one go, but.... single page PDF's only!

How it works:
In the first step GhostScript is used to find the media size (actually the MediaBox). In the second step a new size, calculated from an entered scale factor, is used as a "page size" for PDF output by GhostScript with the -dPDFFitPage option. This works well for scaling down (scale factor less than 100 percent). But it's a bit more challenging for scaling up. PDF's that contain a CropBox (many do) will be scaled up, but only he portion within the original CropBox. So for scaling up this tool enlarges the CropBox parameters in the PDF ... well, a temporary (uncompressed) copy of it - obviously.

To use this Batch PDF Scaler you need GhostScript and Sid's PDF Toolkit (the latter for scaling > 100%). And you need to tell where the GhostScript binaries are located with the menu "Configure" (GS 8.5X typically in "C:\Program Files\gs\gs8.5X\bin").

A note on beforehand: this tool combines PDF's in special ways for economic printing of multipage PDF's. It is not particularly intended or suited for joining a number of PDF documents to one simple multipage document. This can be done with various other free tools, like GhostScript (with my GoBatchGS GUI), Sid Steward's PDF Toolkit (PDFTK), or Ujihara Kazuya's ConcatPDF; the latter is also based on iText and can join and split PDF documents.

This tool combines multipage documents in a way that they can be economically printed side by side, by using the n-up function of the RIP, or the n-up function in the PostScript driver. I decided to use Sid Steward's excellent PDF Toolkit. As an example Sid shows how his toolkit can be used to combine the scans of odd pages with the scans of even pages, when the odd pages were scanned first on a scanner with an automatic document feeder and then the even pages. That came close to what I needed, but it's all done on the command line and that is too cumbersome for me. So I created this GUI that does the following:

• Combines different documents so they can be printed (2-up) side by side (doc 1 page 1 - doc 2 page 1, doc 1 page 2 - doc 2 page 2, ..., doc 1 page n - doc 2 page n); sorts the documents by number of pages; when the number of pages of documents to be printed side by side is not equal, adds blank pages (currently A4 or Letter only)
• Duplicates a document (page 1 - page 1, page 2 - page 2, ...., page n - page n), so 2 copies of the same document can be printed (2-up) side by side (e.g. 2 A4 documents on A3 paper)
• Assembles PDF Pages after double-sided Scanning - as in Sid's example. I personally have no need for this, but could add it "at no extra cost" :-)

The program uses "CreateProcess" in the Windows API to call Sid's PDF Toolkit. This allows a relatively long command line; at about 32k characters it is 4 times longer than what is normally possible on a command line in the "DOS" shell. Sufficient for combining documents with up to 2000 pages.

To use this GUI, you need the PDF Toolkit executable (pdftk.exe). Put the pdftk executable and CombinePDFs executable together in one folder and run CombinePDFs.exe

(Note: in the previous version I used PDFinfo.exe (part of X-PDF) to count the pages; in the current version this is done internally with Angus Johnson's page count code in Delphi; a tip from Kurt Decock).