I am digitizing some old notebooks but my current scanner doesn’t allow for double sided scanning. What’s even worse is that the even pages are in reversed order…
Once again I find myself using the Terminal to quickly fix a common issue. I used a tool called pdftk (I used the MacPorts version). Here is the complete command:
pdftk A=pathToPDF_odd.pdf B=pathToPDF_even.pdf shuffle A Bend-1 output collated_page.pdf
Let’s break it down…
pdftk command to invoke on the terminal
A= first document to act on; in our case the odd pages (use full paths to be safe)
B= second document to act on; in our case the even pages (use full paths to be safe)
shuffle interleave the pages from the two documents
A Bend-1 this one is a bit odd because of the formatting needed. What it should read is A B end-1 meaning: take the pages from A as is, the take the pages of B but reverse them (from the end to page 1).
output set the new filename
That’s it! Now you have a beautifully collated pdf with the pages in the correct order!
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