I have a PDF document that I want to print in booklet form (2 pages each front and back on a letter-size sheet) but the pages are in landscape orientation and it doesn’t work well that way. The document is over 400 pages. So I want to edit the document to change the orientation to portrait, delete a lot of the forced page breaks and some unnecessary material, and I hope to end up with about 300 pages. I have PDF-X full version and it doesn’t seem to allow for that much editing, so I converted the file to Word. But the document is too large, apparently, for the amount of memory I have (8 gigabytes, 7.66 usable). It hangs at every single operation, I can’t even scroll or do much of anything. The Word document is about 12 megabytes, but it has a lot of art elements (mostly drawings rather than photos). I don’t understand why I can’t manipulate 12 MG with over 7GM of memory available, but then I don’t understand all that much about memory.
Is there a way to divide the document (in either version) into two halves so that I can edit them separately and then put them back together at the end? Or any other solution you can think of?
I emailed you a few options for your project as well as just the original manual, converted to portrait and split in half (200 pages per file).
In the future, the simplest way to split the whole thing in half is just to use Microsoft Print to PDF or Adobe PDF printer driver (assuming you have one of those) and do two print jobs. One for the first 200 pages, and another for the last 200.
To delete the pages you don’t want, it’s super easy in Adobe Pro. I don’t know the process for PDF-X. Maybe it’s just as easy? Hope this helps.
The real question is, why are you/were you running out of memory? You did not say how big exactly was the original file, but it was only a few megabytes; that’s nothing. So your problem has nothing to do with Word or with printer drivers.
You don’t have to pay for using LaTeX, i.e., there are no license fees, etc. But you are, of course, invited to support the maintenance and development efforts through a donation to the TeX Users Group (choose LaTeX Project contribution) if you are satisfied with LaTeX.
ConTeXt [sometimes better, depending on one’s use case] are good for generating PDF documents, including PDF/A or PDF/X, and can definitely pull in pages from other PDF files and include them in your document, arbitrarily re-ordered/re-scaled/rotated if you want, eg https://wiki.contextgarden.net/Including_pages_from_PDF_documents
but I think of them more as a tool for authoring documents, say, typesetting your own book or article or poster, than general PDF-manipulation Swiss Army knives like pdftk.
@Bear_Nenno you had the file; was there some memory issue opening it up?
No. I had no problem opening it and manipulating it. I do have 32GB of RAM though. So, there’s plenty to spare. But the file is just a standard 5MB .pdf with text, pictures, and bookmarks. It does have internal hyperlinks, though. Maybe the OP did something during editing to make it buggy. One thing that I found interesting is that when the OP converted it to .docx, he ended up with a 12MB file. When I did it, it was less than 7MB.
That’s probably what I get for using second-rate software. PDF-X was something I felt I could afford, while Adobe Pro is considerably more expensive, especially for how seldom I am likely to use it. I was able to open the 5MB Word file with no problem, and it was only a little slow (and got faster as I went, and eliminated all the unnecessary stuff in the original). The other non-OEM software I was using was LibreOffice Writer instead of MS Word, again for reasons of cost. But that hasn’t been a problem in the past, and I don’t think it was the crux of the problem this time. Instead, the PDF-X conversion to Word was pretty clearly at fault. It’s good to know that for the future.
I am going to output this in booklet format, as I said above, and sew it together into a book, for practice. I have been learning bookbinding lately, and sewing signatures is very calming and therapeutic. And I have found a binding method that is inexpensive and practical for things like user manuals. Many thanks to @Bear_Nenno for the help.
