I am a music director, and a person in my choir is vision impaired.

One of the pieces I've ordered came in PDF form. I would like to be able to enlarge the pdf printout. It will be printed on the same size paper as the normal-size printout (it still needs to fit in the folder), but the printed image needs to be zoomed in to remove the margins and increase the image size as much as possible to increase visibility for this choir member.

I could print a copy and manually enlarge each page on the copy machine, but it's an 80+ page book, which would not be a fun job. I am hoping there is a more automated way to do this while printing the PDF.

I appreciate any help! Thanks!

1 Answer

I have found a way to crop the pages and remove their margins as much as possible and then scale each page to fit the paper size, which I assume to be letter size for the purpose of writing this answer. The cropping is done by the pdfcrop command, which is provided by the texlive-extra-utils package. The scaling is done by cups-pdf, which provides a PDF printer, and lpr.

1. Install pdfcrop and cups-pdf (lpr is already installed by default):

   sudo apt-get install texlive-extra-utils cups-pdf

   Note that the name of the PDF printer is simply PDF.

2. Run pdfcrop on the PDF of interest (this may take a while because your PDF has 80+ pages) and save it with a filename of your choice (I choose cropped.pdf for this answer):

   pdfcrop PDF-of-interest.pdf cropped.pdf

3. Scale the pages such that they fit the paper size (assumed to be letter size for this answer):

   lpr -P PDF -o fit-to-page -o media=Letter cropped.pdf

   Change Letter to A4 if you prefer A4 size.

4. Retrieve the scaled PDF, which is also named cropped.pdf, at ~/PDF.

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