We constantly get engineering spec books in as pdfs for printing.  The
books come in as seperate pdf files per section of the book.  All these
have to be printed to assemble the book.

The catch is that the book needs to be double sided.  Currently our
print shop combines the pdf's in acrobat, prints them single sided and
manually slipsheets the odd numbered page sections so they are even
number (keeping the double sided printing correct).  Then the
slipsheeted pdf is scanned back into our high speed copiers for double
sided printing.

Is there a piece of software out there that can combine the pdf's for
us, as well as insert a blank page so we can eliminate the time and
expense of making the run copy to slipsheet?

Thank you,

Brent J. Liberatore

Which Operating System are you using?

You could combine a couple of well-known freeware tools driven by a
shell script or vbscript to do this pretty easily.

First, use pdfinfo (part of Xpdf) to get the pagecount.  Append a
slipsheet if the pagecount is odd, using a script driving pdftk.  Then
use pdftk to stitch all the PDFs together.


bjlib70@gmail.com wrote:
> We constantly get engineering spec books in as pdfs for printing.  The
> books come in as seperate pdf files per section of the book.  All these
> have to be printed to assemble the book.
>
> The catch is that the book needs to be double sided.  Currently our
> print shop combines the pdf's in acrobat, prints them single sided and
> manually slipsheets the odd numbered page sections so they are even
> number (keeping the double sided printing correct).  Then the
> slipsheeted pdf is scanned back into our high speed copiers for double
> sided printing.
>
> Is there a piece of software out there that can combine the pdf's for
> us, as well as insert a blank page so we can eliminate the time and
> expense of making the run copy to slipsheet?
> 
> Thank you,
> 
> Brent J. Liberatore

Most print controllers (RIP's) can do that automatically (merge, duplex 
and slip-sheet).