Reverse page order of PDF

Grant Bennet-Alder wrote:

You seem to be missing an important detail in this process.

The Original Poster was trying to solve a problem with their scanner.

Yup! Missed it!

Please do not bash Apple over this, it is not Apple's fault that the user's scanner does not duplex.

Nope, wasn't bashing Apple!

You seem to be missing an important detail in this process.

...

The fundamental problem is caused by the operator, not the software. To reverse the order, when you have a stack of papers, is a well understood process

Not so I beg to differ - and here's why: page reordering is a basic reprographic function and it doesn't matter how one comes into possession of said documents (PDF or otherwise for that matter), it is only fair & reasonable to expect this function as standard anyway i.e. they may not have even done the original scanning themselves.

... or can be re-derived with some very simple experiments: Take the top sheet from the source stack and place it as the bottom sheet of the destination stack. Repeat until the source stack is exhausted. Now scan the re-ordered stack.

Yes you are correct to say this but only to a point. Whilst the user could, perhaps, perform a 2nd or 3rd pass to get the reordering correct, that would seem again, fairly redundant given the facilities meant to be offered by any system in general, but especially by Apple (bearing in mind previous postings other than my own).

Besides, if a lot of work is involved (like mine was - and it wasn't even a professional task) then expecting the user to take a multi-pass approach to a service that is easily rendered in software - and indeed should be - is again, a waste of time. It is akin to taking a taxi cab to drive you somewhere, paying full fare, and then being told 1/2 mile from destination that you'll have to finish the drive yourself.

Admittedly, the scanner drivers ought to provide this feature also, as part of a discrete package but all the same, the Apple brand has to mean something too and so it follows that once in PDF, ODF (or whatever) then it doesn't matter what the source was, the ability to reorder should be present and obviously so at that (again, like other features Apple sells it's image on).

So yes, the user could have been able to avert the problem but they are still NOT in error here as s/he has every reasonable expectation for their method to work as a valid one (and is in my opinion a superior because of it's efficiency).

This is extremely simple to do with Automator: Use the "PDF to Images" action to save the even-numbered pages to separate files, then reverse their order with the following Apple script:

on run {input, parameters}

return reverse of input

end run

I use an Automator workflow for exactly the same problem the OP was trying to solve: I have two pdfs from a scanner with ADF but no duplex capability. The first pdf contains the odd pages in ascending order, the second pdf contains the even pages in descending order (scanned by flipping the whole document stack around and putting it in the scanner again). The workflow opens two pdfs containing odd and reversed even pages, reverses the order of even pages and finally shuffles odd and reversed even pages back to one document. I have put my workflow here

http://www.2shared.com/file/8rR6cprW/Process_Even-Odd_Scans.html

Of course, you will need to adapt the directories to your needs.

P.S.: Hacking together the automator action certainly took less time than writing an Apple-bashing rant 😉

Booo yah! After only a measly 2 weeks of occasionally picking up the search to figure this issue out, I find it at the end of a bunch of apple-bashing rants! Thank you so much for the workflow template!!!

I realize that this is a reply to an old post, but I found it while searching and thought I would provide an update.

Here are a couple of other options:

Download and install the open source, free PDFwriter software: http://sourceforge.net/projects/pdfwriterformac/files/

You can then print the documet to the PDFWriter printer using the reversed page handling, even from Adobe applications.

OR

Do something similar with the paid Printopia program. You can enable the "Send to Mac" option and print to that using reversed page handling.

This post is still very old, but it does come up on google quite quickly. pdftk will do this (and many other things) from the command line (and it's free) http://www.pdflabs.com/tools/pdftk-the-pdf-toolkit/

Among other things, PDFSAM can invert all the pages in a pdf document. It's free and it does not require command line usage.

This post is still very old, but it does come up on google quite quickly. pdftk will do this (and many other things) from the command line (and it's free)

http://www.pdflabs.com/tools/pdftk-the-pdf-toolkit/

This is a good app. After installation, open Terminal and type this command to create a new PDF with all the pages reversed:

pdftk in.pdf shuffle r1-r? output out.pdf

in.pdf = the name of the file (place in the home folder) whose pages need to be reversed

r? = change the ? to the total number of pages in your document (actually r1 is the first page of the document in reverse)

out.pdf - the name of the document you wish to be outputed (the document will appear in the home folder)

I was having the same problem. I managed finally to reverse the pages in a pdf by downloading combinepdfs, and then sorting pages in descending order. worked a treat.

Totally misplaced aggression here… Find me a solution for reversing the pages with a Windows app any easier, and I'll go with you. Until then, Acrobat and PDF's aren't Apple products, and Apple along with everyone else in the world apparently doesn't get that sometimes people scan pages in the wrong sequence and have to change them. It is fantastically idiotic for people to say "It would never occur to me that anyone would need that," as someone actually said on another thread. Stunning.

This does not work. Reverse page order only applies to printing, not to creating PDF's. In the future, please test your solution before posting it. Thanks.

This is a Mac users forum. PDFtk is a Windows product.

I have been using your automator function for a couple years now to reverse and interleave PDF pages. However, it broke with Yosemite. One of the functions you are calling is not available with the new automator, and my feeble attempts to fix your macro are not working. Can you post an update that works with Yosemite?

I just saved a .doc file as pdf and the order of pages was reversed. tried some of the solutions proposed here and ended up solving it in a much simpler

way at the suggestion of a friendly applecare advisor over the phone. They suggested I go to Preferences under Windows for Apple, select Print and under "printing options" deselect the "reverse print order." After doing this, when I saved the .doc file as .pdf, the order of pages was correct. Hope this helps.

Interesting, thanks! 🙂