How do you shift all pages of a PDF document right by one inch?

Question

I want to shift all the pages of an existing pdf document right one inch so they can be three hole punched without hitting the content. The pdf documents will be already generated so changing the way they are generated is not possible.

It appears iText can do this from a previous question.

What is an equivalent library (or way do this) for C++ or Python?

If it is platform dependent I need one that would work on Linux.

Update: Figured I would post a little script I wrote to do this in case anyone else finds this page and needs it.

Working code thanks to Scott Anderson’s suggestion:

rightshift.py

#!/usr/bin/python2
import sys
import os
from  pyPdf import PdfFileReader, PdfFileWriter

#not sure what default user space units are. 
# just guessed until current document i was looking at worked
uToShift = 50;

if (len(sys.argv) < 3):
  print "Usage rightshift [in_file] [out_file]"
  sys.exit()

if not os.path.exists(sys.argv[1]):
  print "%s does not exist." % sys.argv[1]
  sys.exit()

pdfInput = PdfFileReader(file( sys.argv[1], "rb"))
pdfOutput = PdfFileWriter()

pages=pdfInput.getNumPages()

for i in range(0,pages):
  p = pdfInput.getPage(i)
  for box in (p.mediaBox, p.cropBox, p.bleedBox, p.trimBox, p.artBox):
    box.lowerLeft = (box.getLowerLeft_x() - uToShift, box.getLowerLeft_y())
    box.upperRight = (box.getUpperRight_x() - uToShift, box.getUpperRight_y())
  pdfOutput.addPage( p )

outputStream = file(sys.argv[2], "wb")
pdfOutput.write(outputStream)
outputStream.close()

Asked By: Joe McGrath

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Source

Answer 1

You can try the pypdf library. In 2022 PyPDF2 was merged back into pypdf.

Answered By: Scott A

Answer 2

Not a full answer, but you can use LaTeX with pdfpages:
http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/macros/latex/contrib/pdfpages/

Multiple commandline linux tools also use this approach, for instance pdfjam uses this:
http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/sci/statistics/staff/academic-research/firth/software/pdfjam

Maybe pdfjam can already provide what you need already.

Answered By: markijbema

Answer 3

two ways to perform this task in Linux

using ghostscript trough gsview
- look in your /root or /home for the hidden file .gsview.ini
- go to section:
[pdfwrite Options]

Options=

Xoffset=0

Yoffset=0

change the values for X axis, settling a convenient value (values are in postscript points, 1 inch = 72 postscript points)

so:

[pdfwrite Options]

Options=

Xoffset=72

Yoffset=0

close .gsview.ini
open your pdf file with gsview
file / convert / pdfwrite
select first odd pages and print to a new file (you can name this as odd.pdf)

now repeat same steps for even pages

open your pdf file with gsview

[pdfwrite Options]

Options=

Xoffset=-72

Yoffset=0

file / convert / pdfwrite
select first even pages and print to a new file (you can name this as even.pdf)

now you need to mix these two pdf with odd and even pages

you can use:

Pdf Transformer

http://sourceforge.net/projects/pdf-transformer/

java -jar ./pdf-transformer-0.4.0.jar <INPUT_FILE_NAME1> <INPUT_FILE_NAME2> <OUTPUT_FILE_NAME> merge -j

2: : use podofobox + pdftk

first step: with pdftk separate whole pdf document in two pdf files with only odd and even pages

pdftk file.pdf cat 1-endodd output odd.pdf && pdftk file.pdf cat 1-endeven output even.pdf
now with podofobox, included into podofo utils
http://podofo.sourceforge.net/about.html
podofobox file.pdf odd.pdf crop -3600 0 widht height for odd pages and
podofobox file.pdf even.pdf crop 3600 0 widht height for even pages

width and height are in postscript point x 100 and can be found with pdfinfo

e.g. if your pdf file has pagesize 482×680, then you enter

./podofobox file.pdf odd.pdf crop -3600 0 48200 68000

./podofobox file.pdf even.pdf crop 3600 0 48200 68000

then you can mix together odd and even in a unique file with already cited

Pdf Transformer

http://sourceforge.net/projects/pdf-transformer/

Answered By: Dingo

Answer 4

Here is a modified version for python3.x.

First install pypdf2 via pip install pypdf2

import sys
import os
from PyPDF2 import PdfFileReader, PdfFileWriter

uToShift = 40; # amount to shift contents by. +ve shifts right

if (len(sys.argv) < 3):
  print ("Usage rightshift [in_file] [out_file]")
  sys.exit()

if not os.path.exists(sys.argv[1]):
  print ("%s does not exist." % sys.argv[1])
  sys.exit()

path=os.path.dirname(os.path.realpath(__file__))
with open(("%s\%s" % (path, sys.argv[1])), "rb") as pdfin:
    with open(("%s\%s" % (path, sys.argv[2])), "wb") as pdfout:
        pdfInput = PdfFileReader(pdfin)
        pdfOutput = PdfFileWriter()

        pages=pdfInput.getNumPages()

        for i in range(0,pages):
          p = pdfInput.getPage(i)
          for box in (p.mediaBox, p.cropBox, p.bleedBox, p.trimBox, p.artBox):
            box.lowerLeft = (box.getLowerLeft_x() - uToShift, box.getLowerLeft_y())
            box.upperRight = (box.getUpperRight_x() - uToShift, box.getUpperRight_y())
          pdfOutput.addPage( p )

        pdfOutput.write(pdfout)

Answered By: Klik

Answer 5

With pdfjam, the command to translate all pages 1 inch to the right is

pdfjam --offset '1in 0in' doc.pdf

The transformed document is saved to doc-pdfjam.pdf. For further options, type pdfjam --help. Currently pdfjam requires a Unix-like command prompt (Linux, Mac, or Cygwin). In Ubuntu, it can be installed with

sudo apt install pdfjam

Answered By: Ben Mares

How do you shift all pages of a PDF document right by one inch?

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