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

24-page black and white pamphlet reduced from ~1.9MB to ~639KB:

1. apt install ghostscript / brew install ghostscript

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

Perform OCR and embed text layer

• Apple's Vision framework via Elucidate produced better results than Tesseract OCR in OCRmyPDF, though there is a new plugin for the latter to leverage Vision: OCRmyPDF AppleOCR. Preview's own use of Vision appears suboptimal:

  "I have played around with the OCR on my mac, and have been very impressed. It has been consistently better than tesseract for my purposes. However, when creating a PDF from images using Preview and exporting using ‘Embed Text’ option to OCR, I have noticed the text is worse than if you OCR the exact same images using the shortcut above or using a script. Presumably Preview is using the Vision framework’s less accurate fast path when preparing the PDF.

❧ 2025-10-25