I needed to make a 2-up pdf out of slide pdfs. That is, original slide pdf is landscape, and I wanted to put 2 slides in one page.
Googling led me “pdfnup”. Since I installed Tex Live 2014 on my machine, pdfnup was already installed.
So, I tried the following
$ pdfnup --orient portrait --nup 1x2 input.pdf
This resulted in error, which said
pdfnup ERROR: the --orient option is not allowed, use --landscape or --no-landscape to specify the output page orientation
so I used –no-landscape option
$ pdfnup --no-landscape --nup 1x2 input.pdf
This made input-nup.pdf and that is 2-up pdf!
This tool is so useful for preparing handouts for presentation.
In addition to the above example, the author shows a nice example of how to produce a handout from a file of presentation slides.
For slides made with the standard 4:3 aspect ratio a nice 6-up handout on A4 paper can be made by
$ pdfjam --nup 2x3 --frame true --noautoscale false \ --delta "0.2cm 0.3cm" --scale 0.95 myslides.pdf \ --outfile myhandout.pdf
