Is there a convenient way to insert blank pdf pages into my pdf?

Question

I have a pdf file foo.pdf. I want to create a pdf file foo-blankbacks.pdf whose odd pages are the pages of foo.pdf and whose even pages are blank. Can this be easily accomplished from the command line?

Answer 1

There's an example in the pdftk man page that serves as a good starting point:

EXAMPLES
   Collate scanned pages
     pdftk A=even.pdf B=odd.pdf shuffle A B output collated.pdf

In your case foo.pdf is called even.pdf and a second pdf called odd.pdf is filled with blank odd pages. The only work left is to count the number of odd pages required.

If you want a quick answer:

$ convert xc:none -page Letter blank.pdf
$ pdftk blank.pdf cat 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 output 10blank.pdf
$ pdftk 10blank.pdf cat 1-10 1-10 1-10 1-10 1-10 1-10 1-10 1-10 1-10 1-10  output 100blank.pdf

I'm sure there's a much neater way to do this... but this will work for the immediate need.

Answer 2

You can hack this with a little script that generates a silly LaTeX file. First, you need to know how many pages you have in your foo.pdf and then create the LatEx file with:

numberOfPages=100 ## change this to the correct number
echo '\documentclass{article}' > new.tex
echo '\usepackage{pdfpages}' >> new.tex
echo '\begin{document}' >> new.tex
for((i=1;i<=$numberOfPages;i++)); do 
    echo "\includepdf[pages=$i]{foo}"
    echo '\newpage\null\thispagestyle{empty}\newpage'
done >> new.tex
echo '\end{document}' >> new.tex

Then, compile it and it should be what you need:

pdflatex new.tex

That said, it would be much easier to just generate the original foo.pdf with extra blank pages, but how to do that would be best asked over at https://tex.stackexchange.com/.