# Print

## Direct print to Brother

Use pdf 1.3

Convert pdf:

	localps2pdf

...or try tab-complete for alternative scripts,
or look at underlying scripts `pdftops`and `pstopdf13`.

## Direct print odd format

	pdftocairo -pdf -paper A4 infile outfile
	pdftops %f
	ps2pdf13 infile outfile

## Resize PDF with crop marks

Simple resizing to fit target paper size
can often be done on-the-fly at the print dialog.
Resizing to another PDF file can however be more reliable,
and much cheaper when passing files to a third-party printing service.

Some PDF processing tools rasterize content,
and scaling is often expressed as either exact width and height
or a width/height scaling factor,
only rarely as the more intuitive area factor.

Resizing by scaling factor is particularly useful
for PDF documents containing bleed and/or crop marks,
where the the _inner_ part to fit a certain size.

This example processes an A3 layout with crop marks
placed on A3 oversize PDF pages,
resizing to have inner part fit A4.

### using plakativ (and mupdf internally)

FIXME: untested!

While the main purpose of plakativ is to not only resize
but also slice onto multiple smaller tiles,
one of its features is easy scaling by area.

	plakativ --factor=0.5 --size=250mmx337mm --output=output.pdf input.pdf

### using Ghostscript

Ghostscript resizing is done by first defining target size
and then tell to resize content to fit that target with `FitPage`.

Simply setting a target `PAPERSIZE` would either scale too much
or (e.g. with `-dUseArtBox`) would loose bleed and crop marks.
Instead we first lookup original width and height with the command `pdfinfo`
and explicitly set those values scaled down by 21/29.7
(the ratio between A3 and A4 page formats).

Example command,
for a PDF document with width 910.24 and height 1258.9
(as reported by `pdfinfo`):

	gs -o output.pdf -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -dDEVICEWIDTHPOINTS=643.60333 -dDEVICEHEIGHTPOINTS=890.131 -dFIXEDMEDIA -dFitPage -dCompatibilityLevel=1.4 input.pdf