Usage¶

pdfbook can be used to create a large book by building it from multple pages and/or printing it on large media. It expects as input a PDF file, normally printing on a single page. The output is again a PDF file, maybe containing multiple pages together building the book.

pdfbook rearranges pages from a PDF document into “signatures” for printing books or booklets, creating a new PDF file. A signature is a group of pages in a document corresponding to sheets of paper folded and bound; these pages are normally not in sequential order in a document. For example, in a document with eight-page signatures, page 8 and page 1 might both be printed on the same sheet of paper.

To rearrange the pages of file newsletter.pdf into a signature and write it to the file newsletter.bound.pdf, type:
```
pdfbook newsletter.pdf newsletter.bound.pdf
```

By default, pdfbook uses one signature for the entire file. If the file doesn’t contain a multiple of four pages, it adds blank pages to the end.

To specify the size of the signature to use - in other words, the number of pages that will appear on a single piece of paper - give the number as an argument to the -s option. Signature size is always a multiple of four.

To rearrange the pages of file newsletter.pdf into an eight-sided signature and write it to newsletter.bound.pdf, type:
```
pdfbook -s8 newsletter.pdf newsletter.bound.pdf
```

Options¶

General Options¶

`-h, --help`	Show help message and exit
`--version`	Show program’s version number and exit
`-v, --verbose`	Be verbose. Can be used more than once to increase the verbosity.
`-n, --dry-run`	Show what would have been done, but do not generate files.
`-s NUMBER, --signature NUMBER`
	Specify the size of the signature (number of sides which will be folded and bound together). Default: 4.