The Traité de documentation : le livre sur le livre, théorie et pratique is an almost hypertextual book on documentation, written in the 1930’s by Paul Otlet. It has many cross-references, tables and illustrations; at times it is written in encyclopedic style, turns into a passionate manifesto, speculative fiction, and a practical manual for librarians. The pdf I have is badly OCR-ed and too heavy for reading comfortably on a digital device. So this morning I transformed the digital version into something that I can print at a copy shop.
I started with extracting the images from the pdf with the help of the imagemagick convert command:
$ mkdir spreads
$ convert Traite\ de\ documentation\ -\ Paul\ Otlet.pdf spreads/%03d.jpg
Next I removed front- and back-cover (they will be treated separately), and also 113.jpg (pages 118-119 are repeated), then cut each spread in half:
mkdir pages
convert spreads/*.jpg -crop 2x1@ pages/%03d.jpg
The properties of the original pdf mention a paper size of 200 × 260 mm (and also that the file was created with ABBYY FineReader on Monday December 3, 2007 16:25:51 CET (This file is already 6 years old …). I am not sure if the measurements refer to the size of the spread or the single page, but from the detailed description in the catalog of the Universiteitsbibliotheek Gent 1 I gather that pages are 26cm high, and will fit comfortably on an A4: 431, [12], viii p. : illus. ; 26 cm.
I then simply put all images back into a new pdf:
convert pages/*jpg traite.pdf
Tomorrow I’ll have the document printed and bound. Can’t wait.