PDF Booklet first purpose was to create booklet(s) from existing PDF files. It has been extended to many other functions in PDF pages manipulation. There are already multiple software which creates booklets, but none had all the features we needed for a precise printing:
- Multiple booklets
- Add blank pages in the beginning and the end
- Adjust scale and margins
All this is necessary when you want to print a PDF in duplex because generally the margins are not correct and the even and odd pages don’t correspond exactly, or the internal margin is too small and reading may be difficult (for a big book), or external margins are too small and the binder will have problems (etc.).
Sending back the file to ask to correct the margins was a problem: you will ruin a layout if you change the margins of a file!
It was better to adjust the PDF itself. With PDF Booklet we can do a precise job in minutes, and since the software was useful for us, we decided to share it with others.
This version 3 uses a new PDF engine which solved all the known incompatibilities of the previous version.
Some of the new features :
- Select several pages for transformations
- Add page numbers
- An advanced feature called “creep adjustment”.
- Support for some annotations with Slow mode
- Move pages with the mouse (still under development)
- Dotted line in the middle of the booklet (display only)
- Disable automatic update
- Help to compare two files
Limitations
The PDF format is quite complex and the PyPDF2 library used by PDF Booklet does not support all the features of the PDF-format. Here are some known limitations:
LZW compression is NOT supported and will not be supported because it is a proprietary format and requires a license. Example: the documentation of PGP cannot be opened by PDF Booklet because it is compressed with LZW
Some PDF files have errors on particular pages because of an error in the gzip decompressor (returned code -5). PDF Booklet tries to continue, but the output page may be blank.
PDF format allows adding annotations which are not really embedded in the page but are a different layer. The pyPdf library does not take this into account, only the real page is handled and annotations may disappear. In secure mode, the situation is better, some annotations are preserved but not all.