Split double-page PDFs, reorder visually, optimize size, & add text layer

Split 2-up PDF into single pages

1. apt install mupdf-tools / brew install mupdf-tools

2. mutool poster -x 2 doublepage.pdf singlepage.pdf

Reorder pages via click-and-drag

• Preview: View → Contact Sheet → click and drag pages to reorder → File → Save

Optimize filesize

1. apt install ghostscript / brew install ghostscript

2. Convert to grayscale and downsample images to 150 dpi (via /ebook):

   gs -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -dCompatibilityLevel=1.4 \
   -sColorConversionStrategy=Gray \
   -dProcessColorModel=/DeviceGray \
   -dPDFSETTINGS=/ebook \
   -dNOPAUSE -dQUIET -dBATCH \
   -sOutputFile=grayscale.pdf singlepage.pdf

Perform OCR and embed text layer

• Apple's Vision framework via either Elucidate (set General, Conversion, and Language options first) or Preview (File→Export…→PDF→Embed Text) produced better results than Tesseract OCR in OCRmyPDF, but there is now a plugin for the latter to leverage Vision: OCRmyPDF AppleOCR. Compare output with pdftotext and Beyond Compare or DiffPDF.

❧ 2025-10-25