Make 4 Slides per Page

Source (link to git-repo or to original if based on someone elses unmodified work): Add the source-code for this project on opencode.net

Score 50.0%

Description:

Remember when you could setup a complex document processing chain in kprinter? I call this the good old KDE 3 times. Using this feature it was possible to chain commands like psnup, psselect, pdftops etc. together in order to print a document exactly the way you wanted to. A feature missed on windows and a major selling point for KDE to me.

Well, KDE 4 has no such feature any more. In fact there is a minimal feature to print multiple pages on one page, but this feature is broken. It prints the pages completely wrong and overlapped. This was the reason I wrote this service menu.

Using this service menu you can print 4 beamer slides (PDF or PostScript) per page already sorted so you get the first page on top when you just hit print. It's a shame that I had to write a service menu for that and that the awesome document processing framework of KDE 3 got dumped. I ask: Why-oh-why is this? I don't consider KDE 4 final without this feature.

Dependencies:
pdftops
ps2pdf
psnup
psselect
kdialog
okular

Screenshot 1: The service menu.
Screenshot 2: A PDF before processing.
Screenshot 3: A PDF after processing.

hsyl20
9 years ago

Thanks for this script!

However, you have to replace "file -bi" by "file -b --mime-type" to be sure to get "application/pdf" instead of "application/pdf; charset=binary".

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TotoKid
10 years ago

... I have to rename path and file in order to remove spaces, make-4-page.sh can't read them.

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TotoKid
10 years ago

And... when it can read a path and successfully edits a pdf, it opens okular with just one blank page.

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hsyl20
9 years ago

Be sure that psutils are installed (psnup, psselect...). Launch the script in console to see if some programs are missing.

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panzi
10 years ago

The strange thing is, with some PDFs it just does not work. E.g. I cant get this PDF zo work right: http://www.ifs.tuwien.ac.at/~strodl/lecture/03_dp_OAIS.pdf

However, OS X does manage to print this PDF like I want to, so I have to print such PDFs on my mothers machine. :(

Maybe it's because of I have to convert it to PostScript because there are no tools like psnup or psselect for PDF that I would be aware of.

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