Arranging PDF Pages in a Grid
Zoom Notes, a note-talking app for iOS, has a feature that allows you to arrange pages of a PDF in a grid. Instead of scrolling and jumping through the document, you can freely explore it on a canvas. The spatial layout allows you to annotate and connect ideas from multiple pages in an easy way. Zoom out and you get a bird’s-eye view on your marginalia and highlights.
Unfortunately, this feature is not available on all the different platforms and devices I use on a regular basis. For a platform-agnostic solution, we can rearrange the pages of a PDF directly and then use any PDF reader of our choice.
A handy tool that let’s you accomplish this (and a lot more interesting things) is pdfjam. It is a script around the pdfpages LaTeX package. Want to split, join, select or layout pages of PDF documents? pdfjam can do it.
pdfjam
We can arrange the pages of a standard PDF document in a grid with n columns and m rows per page as follows.
$ pdfjam in.pdf --nup nxm --outfile out.pdf
pdfjam uses A4 as its default paper size.
If we want a different size, we can use the --paper or --papersize options.
If the margins are too small or too large, we can shrink or extend them using
--trim '<left> <bottom> <right> <top>' --clip
where <left> can be 2cm to shrink the left margin by two centimeters or -5cm to extend it by five centimeters.
Remark: It’s advisable to keep the number of columns and rows of the grid reasonable. Turning a 900-page book into a single 30×30 grid page easily overloads most PDF readers or at least degrades the performance.
Explanations of the other interesting features and options for pdfjam can be found in the help (pdfjam --help) and the documentation of the pdfpages package.