I got presented, late this afternoon, with an 800 page PDF that had clearly never been intended to be printed. Actually, most of it didn't need to be, but there are four pages with a lot of detail, in tables, set out in a tiny font that, even blown up to A3, still comes out no bigger than about 5pt.
Nothing I have that can edit PDFs could do anything helpful.
Eventually, after much messing around, I did this:
Use a freebie PDF splitter (I used PDFill -- I don't like it, it crashed twice, but it did the job on the third attempt) to pull out the relevant pages into a standalone PDF.
Use SumatraPDF (I don't like Adobe and avoid it whenever possible) to display the new file and zoomed in until the text was all extremely visible.
Used ScreenshotCaptor in its capture scrolling object mode to capture the document to a PNG that can then be cropped and scaled appropriately and printed using a poster-printing mode.
And It Just Worked. Well, I helped it by counting the vertical and horizontal moves (15 x 4, in case you care) but I didn't even have to fine-tune the final join. Perfect.
More brownie points for me and every chance of upsetting a number of people who clearly believe the best way to hide important information is to print it extremely small and protect the PDF against text copying. Hah.
Okay, it's sad, I was on my own and nobody was around but I actually said aloud "Mouser, you're a genius!" (If you were listening VERY hard, you might even have heard me.)
Nothing I have that can edit PDFs could do anything helpful.
Eventually, after much messing around, I did this:
Use a freebie PDF splitter (I used PDFill -- I don't like it, it crashed twice, but it did the job on the third attempt) to pull out the relevant pages into a standalone PDF.
Use SumatraPDF (I don't like Adobe and avoid it whenever possible) to display the new file and zoomed in until the text was all extremely visible.
Used ScreenshotCaptor in its capture scrolling object mode to capture the document to a PNG that can then be cropped and scaled appropriately and printed using a poster-printing mode.
And It Just Worked. Well, I helped it by counting the vertical and horizontal moves (15 x 4, in case you care) but I didn't even have to fine-tune the final join. Perfect.
More brownie points for me and every chance of upsetting a number of people who clearly believe the best way to hide important information is to print it extremely small and protect the PDF against text copying. Hah.
Okay, it's sad, I was on my own and nobody was around but I actually said aloud "Mouser, you're a genius!" (If you were listening VERY hard, you might even have heard me.)
