This post is mostly just a reminder to myself, but it may be useful to
others. I was recently asked to convert a .ppt, or Powerpoint slideshow
document, into a three slides per page, horizontally centered, one on
top of another, with frames around each slide. Powerpoint itself offers
several printing options, including a 2n per page (ie. 2, 4,
8, etc) as well as handouts, which can do 3 per page but are incredibly
small and have writing lines besides the slides. Luckily, Powerpoint can
save the .ppt into a .pdf, and there are plenty of PDF manipulation
tools on Linux, and are generally much more readily available than on
Windows. Scribus is an option, but after some searching I discovered
pdfnup, part of the pdfjam package. This is the command I ended
up using:
pdfnup --nup 1x3 --no-landscape --frame true --batch foo.pdf bar.pdf etc.pdf
For a full explanation of the commands, you can try looking at its
manpage, or pdfnup --help, which
is much more useful.