(I had to repost this with smaller attachments.) On Tue 11 Jan 2022 at 10:00:06 (-0600), Richard Owlett wrote: > On 01/11/2022 09:27 AM, Alexander V. Makartsev wrote: > > On 11.01.2022 19:37, Richard Owlett wrote: > > > I use MATE and thus use Atril as viewer. > > > Typically I have no need to modify PDF documents. > > > I received a reading a long reading list which needs to be > > > rotated left to be read. Atril rotates it but does not save it > > > as rotated. > > > > > > What's the simplest tool to permanently rotate that specific document? > > > TIA > > I'd go with GIMP. > > Simply open any .pdf file and use Transform function ( Image > > > Transform > Rotate... ). > > After that Export ( File > Export As ) the edited document as a > > new file and check the results in .pdf viewer. > > GIMP will also handle multi-paged .pdf documents just fine. > > Worked like a charm. I tend to think of PDF as just another text format. > I date from Teletype and Decwriter era ;}
I can't see any attraction in using Gimp, because that rotates the image on the page, whereas what you want is to rotate the pages. I took a random PDF downloaded last year: historyofmoderne0000sche.pdf and ran pdftk on it to get these timings and files: $ time pdftk /tmp/historyofmoderne0000sche.pdf cat 1-endeast output /tmp/pdftk-east.pdf real 0m1.569s user 0m2.285s sys 0m0.634s $ ls -Glg /tmp/historyofmoderne0000sche.pdf /tmp/pdftk-east.pdf -rw-r----- 1 16779995 Feb 29 2020 /tmp/historyofmoderne0000sche.pdf -rw-r----- 1 16242357 Jan 11 17:14 /tmp/pdftk-east.pdf $ pdfinfo /tmp/historyofmoderne0000sche.pdf | grep -v ' no$' Title: History of modern Europe Author: Schevill, Ferdinand, 1868-1954 Creator: Internet Archive Producer: Recoded by LuraDocument PDF v2.68 CreationDate: Sat Feb 29 08:26:54 2020 CST ModDate: Sat Feb 29 09:36:18 2020 CST Tagged: yes Form: none Pages: 512 Page size: 408 x 639 pts Page rot: 0 File size: 16779995 bytes Optimized: yes PDF version: 1.5 $ pdfinfo /tmp/pdftk-east.pdf | grep -v ' no$' Creator: pdftk 3.0.2 - www.pdftk.com Producer: itext-paulo-155 (itextpdf.sf.net-lowagie.com) CreationDate: Tue Jan 11 17:14:05 2022 CST ModDate: Tue Jan 11 17:14:05 2022 CST Form: none Pages: 512 Page size: 408 x 639 pts Page rot: 90 ← note the rotation here File size: 16242357 bytes PDF version: 1.5 $ Then I followed the instructions above: I opened the PDF with File → Open, and a little window appeared that had tiles being added at the top, and an Import button below, which expected to be pressed. Under the window, it said "All 512 pages selected". When I pressed Import, top showed a file-pdf-load process running at ~97%, and it consumed three minutes of CPU. Eventually the progress bar crawled across, and the first page was displayed in the main window. As instructed above, I selected Image → Transform → Rotate and 90° clockwise. A progress bar swept across under the image in a few seconds. I then selected File → Export As, added rot- to the beginning of the filename, and pressed Export. A file-pdf-save process was displayed by top for about 30 seconds, whereupon the output file appeared in /tmp. In top, gimp and file-pdf-save were using ~180% of CPU in total. However, although the file was huge, it only displayed a single page, confirmed by pdfinfo. So I repeated the Export command, but selected an option to export Layers as Pages. This gave me a multipage PDF, but the pages were backwards, so I repeated Export again, this time also adding Reverse the Pages Order. $ ls -Glg /tmp/historyofmoderne0000sche.pdf /tmp/rot-historyofmoderne0000sche.pdf -rw-r----- 1 16779995 Feb 29 2020 /tmp/historyofmoderne0000sche.pdf -rw-r----- 1 142836917 Jan 11 17:31 /tmp/rot-historyofmoderne0000sche.pdf $ pdfinfo /tmp/rot-historyofmoderne0000sche.pdf | grep -v ' no$' Producer: cairo 1.16.0 (https://cairographics.org) CreationDate: Tue Jan 11 17:31:06 2022 CST Form: none Pages: 512 Page size: 638.64 x 407.52 pts Page rot: 0 File size: 142836917 bytes PDF version: 1.5 $ The corresponding timings for Gimp were: real n/a (with all the repeating) user 6m13.760s sys 0m7.833s I got this timing down a bit, by repeating the entire process above, without exporting three times: user 4m8.129s sys 0m5.077s So, about 100 times slower than pdftk. Then I inspected the results at 1200% magnification, tiny fragments of which are attached. You can see the problem. Finally, using a GUI doesn't scale well. One could rotate any number of documents with a single line of commands using pdftk, and presumably with Curt's similar qpdf method as well (untested as not installed). Clicking one's way round a GUI can't compete. Cheers, David.
