Save the environment AND your eyesight!

I have to read a lot lately and therefore I print out everything. I don't like to read publications, papers and other scientific stuff on the screen, as there is no easy possibility to take down notes, mark some lines and interact with this thing. I just like to work with paper and pencil!

To save the environment a little bit, I always print two pdf pages onto one sheet - double-sided of course - leading to 4 virtual pdf pages being printed onto one single sheet of paper.

This is awesome, but my eyes start to hurt after some time, because the text is so unbelievably small. However, I realised that there is a lot of white space on these sheets and somehow it should be possible to remove the white space and "zoom" the pages a little bit for a better readability.

Exactly this is done by pdfcrop (http://pdfcrop.sourceforge.net/)!

You just type something like

$ pdfcrop --margins 5 input.pdf output.pdf

into your terminal and then print the output.pdf as usual. You will realise that the font size has almost doubled (or sometimes even more), only with removing the white borders. Happy reading!