–viewport 'left bottom right top' Consider image to consist of given rectangle only.

–trim 'left bottom right top' Similar to viewport, but here the four lengths specify the amount to remove or add to each side.

–angle angle Rotation angle (counterclockwise).

–width width Required width. The graphic is scaled to this width.

–height height Required height. The graphic is scaled to this height.

–keepaspectratio bool Do not distort figure if both width and height are given.

–scale float Scale factor. Applied after automatic scaling.

–clip bool Clip the graphic to the viewport.

–pagebox (mediabox | cropbox | bleedbox | trimbox | artbox) Specify which PDF bounding box specification to read.

–draft bool Switch to draft mode.

Usage examples

Batch 2-upping of documents

Consider converting each of two documents to a side-by-side "2-up" format. Since we want the two documents to be processed separately, we'll use the --batch option:

pdfjam --batch --nup 2x1 --suffix 2up --landscape file1.pdf file2.pdf

This will produce new files file1-2up.pdf and file2-2up.pdf in the current working directory.

Merging pages from 2 documents

Suppose we want a single new document which puts together selected pages from two different files:

pdfjam file1.pdf '{},2-' file2.pdf '10,3-6' --outfile ../myNewFile.pdf

The new file myNewFile.pdf, in the parent directory of the current one, contains an empty page, followed by all pages of file1.pdf except the first, followed by pages 10, 3, 4, 5 and 6 from file2.pdf.

The resulting PDF page size will be whatever is the default paper size for you at your site. If instead you want to preserve the page size of (the first included page from) file1.pdf, use the option --fitpaper true.

All pages in an output file from pdfjam will have the same size and orientation. For joining together PDF files while preserving different page sizes and orientations, pdfjam is not the tool to use.

A 4-up document with frames

To make a portrait-oriented 4-up file from the pages of three input files, with a thin-line frame around the input pages:

pdfjam file1.pdf file2.pdf file3.pdf --frame true --nup 2x2 \
  --suffix 4up --outfile ~/Documents

Here a directory was specified at --outfile: the resultant file in this case will be ~/Documents/file3-4up.pdf. (Note that if there's a writeable file with that name already, it will be overwritten: no check is made, and no warning given.)

Convert a 'US letter' document to A4

Suppose we have a document made up of 'US letter' size pages, and we want to convert it to A4:

pdfjam 'my US letter file.pdf' --a4paper --outfile 'my A4 file.pdf'

Handouts from presentation slides

A useful application of pdfjam is for producing a handout from a file of presentation slides. For slides made with the standard 4:3 aspect ratio a nice 6-up handout on A4 paper can be made by

pdfjam --nup 2x3 --frame true --noautoscale false --delta '0.2cm 0.3cm' \
  --scale 0.95 myslides.pdf --outfile myhandout.pdf

The --delta option here comes from the pdfpages package; the --scale option is passed to LaTeX's \includegraphics command.

Slides made by LaTeX's beamer package, using the handout class option, work especially nicely with this! The example wrapper scripts pdfjam-slides3up and pdfjam-slides6up, in the pdfjam-extras repository, are for 3-up and 6-up handouts, respectively.

Trimming pages; and piped output

Suppose we want to trim the pages of our input file prior to n-upping. This can be done by using a pipe:

pdfjam myfile.pdf --trim '1cm 2cm 1cm 2cm' --clip true \
  --outfile /dev/stdout \
  | pdfjam --nup 2x1 --frame true --outfile myoutput.pdf

The --trim option specifies an amount to trim from the left, bottom, right and top sides respectively; to work as intended here it needs also --clip true. These (i.e., trim and clip) are in fact options to LaTeX's \includegraphics command (in the standard graphics package).

Thanks go to Christophe Lange and Christian Lohmaier for suggesting an example on this.

Output pages suitable for binding

To offset the content of double-sided printed pages so that they are suitable for binding with a Heftstreifen, use the --twoside option:

pdfjam --twoside myfile.pdf --offset '1cm 0cm' --suffix 'offset'

Input file with nonstandard name

To use PDF input files whose names do not end in '.pdf', you will need to use the --checkfiles option. This depends on the availability of the file utility, with support for the options -Lb; this can be checked by trying

file -Lb 'my PDF file'

where 'my PDF file' is the name of a PDF file on your system. The result should be something like 'PDF document, version 1.4' (possibly with a different version number).

With 'file -Lb' available, we can use PDF files whose names lack the usual '.pdf' extension. For example,

pdfjam --nup 2x1 --checkfiles 'my PDF file'

will result in a file named 'my PDF file-2x1.pdf' in the current working directory.

Rotate every 2nd page

If you want to print a landscape-oriented PDF document on both sides of the paper, using a duplex printer that does not have 'tumble' capability, make a new version with every second page rotated for printing:

pdfjam --landscape --doublepagestwistodd true my-landscape-document.pdf

Configuration

You can configure pdfjam to your needs by putting a file called pdfjam.conf in any directory specified by pdfjam --configpath or a .pdfjam.conf in your home directory. See the pdfjam.conf coming with your installation or online for a list of available configuration variables.

For setting the default paper size, also consider configuring (or installing) libpaper.

Troubleshooting

• The script runs but the output doesn't look the way it should. Why?

Most likely either your pdfTeX or your pdfpages installation is an old version. You could check also that pdftex.def, typically to be found in .../texmf/tex/latex/graphics/, is up to date. If the problem persists even with up-to-date versions of pdfTeX, pdftex.def and pdfpages, then please do report it.

• What can I do to solve a “Too many open files” error?

This error has been reported to occur sometimes, when dealing with large numbers of documents/pages. A suggested solution, if this happens, is to include additionally (in the call to pdfjam):

  --preamble '\let\mypdfximage\pdfximage
  \def\pdfximage{\immediate\mypdfximage}'
  

• Minor details of the font got missing in the output. Why?

Sometimes font information (such as ligatures) is lost from the output of pdfjam. It seems that a fairly simple fix when this happens is to add the option --preamble '\pdfinclusioncopyfonts=1' in your call to pdfjam.

• My --preamble '\usepackage[...]{geometry}' causes failure. What shall I do?

The geometry package gets already loaded by pdfjam, so just use \geometry{} for any further settings.

• My --preamble '\usepackage[...]{color}' does not work. What to do?

Either do not use in conjunction with --pagecolor or use with --pagecolor, but then do not load the color package again.

Reporting bugs

Please report any bugs found in pdfjam on GitHub.

Developing

This project uses l3build for building (l3build unpack), testing (l3build check) and installing (l3build install). See the first few lines of build.lua for more information.

The History of pdfjam

The first versions of PDFjam were made by David Firth with the first release of the pdfnup script dating back to 2002-04-04 and the name PDFjam debuting with the 1.0 release on 2004-05-07. Several releases followed until version 2.08 on 2010-11-14.

Nine years later — on 2019-11-14 — David Firth published an overhauled version 3.02, now called pdfjam (in lower letters). The next November, maintenance went over to Reuben Thomas were it remained until November 2024, when Markus Kurtz took over.

What follows is David Firth’s account of pdfjam’s history:

This all grew originally from a script named pdfnup. That was later joined,
in a published package called 'PDFjam', by two further scripts pdfjoin and
pdf90.

>

At version 2.00, everything was unified through a single script pdfjam, with
many more options. Along with pdfjam various 'wrapper' scripts — i.e.,
other scripts that use pdfjam in different ways — were provided, mainly as
examples.

>

From version 3.02, the extra 'wrapper' scripts are removed from the package,
mainly because they are hard to maintain: different users want different
things, and pdfjam itself provides all the options in any case. So I have
broken out the wrapper scripts into a separate repository, unsupported —
so that people can still see and use/adapt them if they want. And maybe even
someone else will want to take on the task of improving and maintaining some
of them, who knows? The wrapper scripts (no longer maintained) can now be
found at https://github.com/pdfjam/pdfjam-extras.

For historic release notes, see the README.md as of pdfjam v3.04.

Releases from version 1.0 up to version 2.08 are still available at https://pdfjam.github.io/pdfjam. For any releases after that, see https://github.com/pdfjam/pdfjam/releases.