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.