Go
pdftilecut lets you sub-divide a PDF page(s) into smaller pages so you can print them on small form printers.

pdftilecut lets you sub-divide a PDF page(s) into smaller pages so you can print them on small form printers. This operation is sometimes called posterizing (related to printing large posters on home printers) and tile cropping.

Installation

Latest statically linked binaries are available on releases page.

Features

• Statically compiled Go binaries with no OS dependencies.
• Multi page PDF support. Each page can be of arbitrary size.
• Each output page has appropriate PDF bleed and trim boxes set (so you can give it to a printing house and get back correctly trimmed pages).
• Print marks to assist with accurate trimming and arranging.
• Small increase in output size.

Usage

We want to print mars.pdf from the beautiful NASA posters collection, which comes in 20x30 inch size, on A4 papers:

$ pdftilecut -tile-size A4 -in mars.pdf -out mars_a4.pdf

Below on the left is the orignal poster, and two of its tiles on the right:

The header contains the orignal page number and a tile reference for easier arranging:

Credits

The amazing QPDF library is used to parse and write back modified PDF files. QPDF relies on libz and libjpeg. Library sources are not included in this repo and must be downloaded separately.