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I want to convert a pdf file so that each page is cut horizontally into two pieces, with some overlap. My machine is mac and I'm now using mutool with the following command:

mutool poster -y 2 in.pdf out.pdf

But this is not exactly what I want. Because each page is cut down in the middle, it's possible that some pages are cut exactly in the middle of a line, making it hard to read the last line of the first page and the first line of the second page.

E.g. here is an example page:

enter image description here

Mutool would split it into two pages, with the top half:

enter image description here

and bottom half:

enter image description here

But I want some overlapping margins so that the middle sentence is still readable, like this:

enter image description here

and

enter image description here

The closest thing I can find is to use ghostscript, like the one in this topic Chop pages of a PDFs into multiple pages

But I'm no programmer and I don't know how to make ghostscript work for this situation. Please help!

(I understand there's another tool called pdfposter, but, like mutool, it has no option for overlapping margin.)

Chav Likit
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1 Answers1

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There is an amazing graphical tool called krop which I learned about here. There is a package for it in Ubuntu 20.04, which is how I installed it.

krop is a super tool! It allows you to select any number of (possibly overlapping) regions to chop each page into, can automatically shrink a selection to remove the surrounding whitespace, and can crop differentially for even and odd pages.

Best of all, it has a built in option to split the selected area into equally sized (overlapping) pieces for reading on a 4:3 ebook screen, which was precisely my intended application for chopping-with-overlap (and is perhaps yours too...)!

Joj Helfer
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