cut2col

cut2col is a utility for converting 2-column to 1-column pdf documents. This is done by cutting each page into 4 pieces and merging them together so that they can be viewed on a tiny e-book reader.

Download & Installation

· Download the latest version of cut2col

· Version 0.34c (January 6, 2012) : cut2col-v34c.jar

· Version 0.34b (December 14, 2011) : cut2col-v34b.jar

· Version 0.34a (April 25, 2011) : cut2col-v34a.jar

· Version 0.34 (April 9, 2011) : cut2col-v34.jar

· Version 0.32c (March 29, 2011) : cut2col-v32c.jar

· Version 0.32b (March 2, 2011) : cut2col-v32b.jar

· Version 0.32a (Feb. 22, 2011) : cut2col-v32a.jar

· Version 0.32 (Nov. 15, 2010) : cut2col-v32.jar

· Version 0.31 (Nov. 11, 2010) : cut2col-v31.jar

· Version 0.25 (Nov. 1, 2010) : cut2col-v25.jar

· If you already have Java (at least version 5) installed, just double-click the downloaded
cut2col to run the program

· If you don’t have Java installed on your computer, get it at http://www.java.com

Version 0.34c  (6 January 2012)

· Bug fixed for error when adjusting bounds close to the page border.

Version 0.34b  (14 December 2011)

· Bug fixed for error when the first page is blank.

Version 0.34a  (25 April 2011)

· Bug fixed for global left-bound adjustment

Version 0.34  (09 April 2011)

· Accept command-line arguments for GUI-less (java headless) app.  There are 4 command-line arguments as follow

· vcut  (default is -vcut:auto)

o -vcut:on  <-- always vertically cut in half

o -vcut:off  <-- no vertical cut

o -vcut:auto  <-- let's the program decide based on page content

· hcut (default is -hcut:auto)

o -hcut:on  <-- always horizontally cut in half

o -hcut:off  <-- no horizontal cut

o -hcut:auto  <-- let's the program decide based on page content & aspect ratio

· Two last arguments are input and output files (double quotes are needed for file-spec containing spaces)

· For examples  

· java -jar cut2col-v34.jar -vcut:on -hcut:off c:\temp\in.pdf c:\temp\out.pdf

· java -jar cut2col-v34.jar -vcut:on -hcut:on "c:\temp\in file.pdf" "c:\temp\out file.pdf"

· add "check for updates…"

· Bugs fixed :  resizing window,  180-degree rotated pdfs

Version 0.32c  (29 Mar. 2011)

· Bug fixed for very-narrow-white-margin documents

Version 0.32b  (03 Mar. 2011)

· Handle pages with rotations (can't handle 180-degree documents)

Version 0.32a  (22 Feb. 2011)

· Handle pages with rotations  (lot of bugs)

Version 0.32  (15 Nov. 2010)

· Auto-remove blank pages

Version 0.31  (11 Nov. 2010)

· Each page has its own crop boxes.

· Automatically set sizes and positions of all crop boxes (manually re-adjustable).

· Top and bottom margins can be adjusted globally to crop header and footer of all pages.

· Left and right margins can be adjusted to globally crop hanging text.
(Globally margin adjustment is done by moving the box borders with right mouse button. When left mouse button is used, it is for local individual page)

· Support one-column documents. (this feature does not work as I expected, but you can try it.)

Version 0.25  (1 Nov. 2010)

Get Started

· A plain simple window is shown after double click cut2col.jar
· Click the Open PDF to select an input PDF file.
· The first page will be shown with two crop boxes.
· Click and drag mouse to adjust sizes and positions of the two crop boxes. · A horizontal black line is drawn at the middle of the page. · You can turn to other pages to see whether the two crop boxes are properly placed.
· Click the Cut+Merge button, to crop, cut, merge, and save the output pdf file. · Each page is cut into 4 subpages with the upper and lower subpages slightly overlapped (around 0.5cm.), just in case that we unintentionally cut the sentence in half. · The output file will be named the same as the input name with “_1col” appended and saved at the same folder as the input.
· A numeric value shown inside the red box is a width-to-height ratio of the subpage (a typical value for the 6” e-reader should be around 0.75)

Credits : this work is made possible by

· iText (http://itextpdf.com) for cut and merge pdf documents.

· JPedal (http://www.jpedal.org) for converting pdf pages to images
(used in version 0.31 and up since it’s much better than PDFRenderer)

· OneJar (http://one-jar.sourceforge.net/ for packaging executable jar)

· PDFRenderer (https://pdf-renderer.dev.java.net) for converting pdf pages to images (used in version 0.25).

· Java (http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/index.html)

Please send any comment or suggestion to somchaip@chula.ac.th