Changing the size of all pages in a PDF

Azoth · Brolly Dolly Joined: 07 Jul 2016 Karma :

Some old books are currently only available as PDF files. The pages in these PDF files are A4-sized or larger. I want to order, and send to myself, one-off, bound, hard copies from these files, using a print-on-demand service. The POD company offers several different product options depending on page size. The sizes of each page in the scanned PDF files are inconvenient.

Does anyone know of an easy way to scale the sizes of all pages in a PDF document, without Adobe Pro? There are free online programs hosted by some websites that do it, but they apply a small size limit for the PDF files. There are some complex ways to do what I want to do, such as splitting up the PDF file and feeding each smaller file to the server-side web application to process all of them, or converting the PDF to a lot of image files, scaling them, then printing to PDF. But it would be nicer if there was a less labour-intensive solution.

Thanks
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ScaredyCat · World Chat Champion Joined: 19 May 2012 Karma :

imagemagick can convert pages to png, scale and rebuild a PDF with them. I had to do this with a pdf presentation that was originally 279Mb - after saving them out as pngs and reforming, it was an 18Mb file that loaded in a fraction of the time.

Azoth · Brolly Dolly Joined: 07 Jul 2016 Karma :

Pages to numbered PNG files, then resize, then convert star dot PNG back to PDF, all using some sort of command line interface. OK, I think that should do for me. I'll give it a shot. Many thanks
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Jayy · Mr. Ponzi Joined: 08 Jun 2009 Karma :

What books are they? They obviously existed in book format at some stage and assume they are quite rare to find?

I literally have access to millions of physical books. Only problem is, they aren't exactly sorted and spread over two locations 250 miles apart but if you gave a list, I could get people to keep an eye out for them?

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Azoth · Brolly Dolly Joined: 07 Jul 2016 Karma :

Thanks Jayy. You work for BL I presume. These books are from the 1950s and concern the physics and maths of valve amplifiers, a subject I'm trying to learn about. They were recommended to me on an internet forum. They still exist and can be obtained through BL catalogues or through university libraries, but aren't currently in print. You can download them online as clear PDFs. But reading on the screen isn't how I'm going to digest this stuff, which is a bit dry. It's easier, quicker and cheaper for me to click a couple of times from home, have them printed and bound and posted to my house than looking around. I appreciate the offer.
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Jayy · Mr. Ponzi Joined: 08 Jun 2009 Karma :

ScaredyCat · World Chat Champion Joined: 19 May 2012 Karma :

Lord Percy · World Chat Champion Joined: 03 Aug 2012 Karma :

There's a program called Calibre which deals with e-books of all types including PDF.

You can convert from one version to another. E-book file types are a bit iffy but PDF output is fine. I converted a book just yesterday, from epub to PDF.

PDF to PDF would have no problem at all, I expect. Pages with pictures can sometimes cause a slight hiccup so that's the only thing to look out for.

You can specify everything in the conversion process, including font style, size, spacing, page size etc.

Calibre download