N-down

An alternative to poster and cut
Create a poster for the selected page by cutting symmetrically into n tiles.
The poster for each selected page is packaged into a PDF file in outDir containing an outline view followed by pages representing the poster tiles.
This command may be viewed as inverse to n-Up.
See also the related commands: poster, cut
Have a look at some examples.

Usage

pdfcpu ndown [ description ] n inFile outDir [ outFile ] [flags]

Flags

name	description	required
p(ages)	selected pages	no

Common Flags

Arguments

name	description	required
description	configuration string	no
n	the N-down value	yes
inFile	PDF input file	yes
outDir	output directory	yes
outFileName	PDF output file name	no

N-down Value

The following table lists all supported values for n and the resulting poster tile layout with respect to the orientation of the chosen output paper size.

value	portrait	landscape	Example
2	1x2	2x1	A1 -> 2 x A2
3	1x3	3x1
4	2x2	2x2	A1 -> 4 x A3
8	2x4	4x2	A1 -> 8 x A4
9	3x3	3x3
12	3x4	4x3
16	4x4	4x4	A1 -> 16 x A5

Description

A configuration string to specify the details of the grid layout.

parameter	description	values
margin	margin / glue area in display units	>= 0.0
bgcolor	margin / glue area color value	color
border	draw content region border along set margin	on/off, true/false, t/f

Examples

The page format is A2, the printer supports A3.
Quick cut a page into 2 equally sized pages.
Results in a PDF containing 3 pages for each processed page:

$ pdfcpu ndown 2 test.pdf .
cut test.pdf into ./ ...
writing test_page_1.pdf

The page format is A2, the printer supports A4.
Quick cut page into 4 equally (A4) sized pages.
Results in a PDF containing 5 pages for each processed page:

$ pdfcpu ndown 4 test.pdf .
cut test.pdf into ./ ...
writing test_page_1.pdf

The page format is A2, the printer supports A4.
Quick cut page into 4 equally (A4) sized pages and provide a dark gray glue area of 1 cm.
Results in a PDF containing 5 pages for each processed page:

$ pdfcpu ndown 'margin:1, bgcol:DarkGray, border:on' 4 test.pdf . -u cm
cut test.pdf into ./ ...
writing test_page_1.pdf