Light pdf editing

Factual Questions
1

Here’s the sitch : I’ve got a bundle of .pdf files, made up of images and text related to them, intended to be viewed together. However, due to how the documents are structured (i.e., badly), the “display two pages side by side” option gets messed up. The idea was that the image would be on the left hand page, and the text relating to the image would be on the page opposite.

However, because somebody neglected to add a blank page before or after the title page, what happens is that when viewed, the first couple pages is title+image1, then image 2 on the right side of textpage 1 etc… What I want to do is either :

  1. insert a blank page early on, so that everything automagically shifts into place,
    or
  2. find a way to display pages 2&3, 4&5 etc… side by side rather than the default (and, as far as I can see, strictly enforced by Acrobat Reader) 1&2, 3&4…

Ideas ? Suggestions ? Facepalm inducements ?

2

pdftk is a command-line tool that will do what you want (and can be used as part of a shell script if you have enough files to convert to make this worth it). If you want a blank page after page 1, you’d do something like


pdftk A=oldfile.pdf B=blank.pdf cat A1 B1 A2-end output newfile.pdf

(where “blank.pdf” contains a single blank page, or whatever you’d like to insert after the title page).

3

Perfect ! Thank you for the fast answer.

4

I don’t have Reader on this computer, only the full Acrobat Pro, but I have an option to View > Page Display > Show Cover Page During Two-Up. If you have that option, it should do what you need.