Super User is a question and answer site for computer enthusiasts and power users. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
Is there a free program that allows you to merge several pdf pages into one page? For example, suppose I had an eight-page document. Is there a program that would allow me to produce therefrom a "two-page" document with pages 1-4 on the front side and pages 5-8 on the back?
(Note: I am not asking how to merge several pdf files into a single file.)
Using adobe acrobat, you can select layout options and change the "pages per sheet." To shrink four pages of the original document, you would select 4. You can also turn on 2-sided printing. Then save as PDF instead of actually printing.
There are a number of applications that can print more than one page to a single sheet, such as free LibreOffice Writer (available for Windows, Mac, Linux and other OS) and PDF_XChange Editor (a Windows app, but it runs well under wine in Linux). If you prefer to save the output as PDF, rather than printing directly, just use the built-in "Print to PDF" capability in your OS.
This shows the print dialog of PDF_XChange Editor on Windows OS. Note the preview pane, and ability to have pages arranged horizontally or vertically, making it easier to format the output.
Depending on your definition of free, you can use cpdf from https://community.coherentpdf.com/ and do:
cpdf -impose-xy "2 2" in.pdf -o out.pdf
You could then follow up with a -scale-to-fit command to get your desired page size:
cpdf -scale-to-fit a4portrait out.pdf -o out2.pdf
