Rearrange pages from front and back pdf files which are scanned from two-sided papers

 

1. Merge 0001.pdf and 0002.pdf into one.
2. Make a list of indexes. Interleave two indexes. First one is 0 to 19. Second one is reversed as 39 to 20.
3. Rearrange the merged.pdf as the ordered_indexes list.

I scanned both-sided papers into two pdf files, front pages and reversed back pages. Merge and rearrange pages from two pdf files into one pdf file.

script methods

1. https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/53295/how-to-merge-2-pdf-files-with-interleaving-pages-order

tools

1. https://pdfsam.org/pdfsam-basic/

RearrangePdf-PdfFilePath_Output-PdfFilePath_OrdersList_Input.py

In [4]: from PyPDF2 import PdfFileMerger

In [6]: merger = PdfFileMerger()

In [11]: pdfs = ['/Users/.../Downloads/0001.pdf', '/Users/.../Downloads/0002.pdf']

In [12]: for f in pdfs: merger.append(f)

In [13]: merger.write("a.pdf")

In [14]: merger.close()

In [15]: from PyPDF2 import PdfFileReader, PdfFileWriter

In [16]: reader = PdfFileReader('a.pdf')

In [35]: f_page_idxes = range(20) ; b_page_idxes = reversed(range(20, 40)) ; fb_page_idxes = zip(f_page_idxes, b_page_idxes)

In [41]: ordered_idxes = list(itertools.chain(*fb_page_idxes))

In [42]: writer = PdfFileWriter()

In [43]: for p in ordered_idxes: writer.addPage(reader.getPage(p))

In [45]: with open("arranged_pdf.pdf", "wb") as f: writer.write(f)