Your operating system can print several pages on one. Sometimes however you may want to have the PDF showing several slides on a single page, e.g. for handouts of a presentation. On a Linux system, psnup/pdfnup are extremely flexible if you are familiar with these commands and their options. But it’s definitely faster and more convenient to do it from inside a LaTeX document using pgfpages with just two lines of code.
Example 1: Two on One
\usepackage{pgfpages}
\pgfpagesuselayout{2 on 1}[a4paper,border shrink=5mm]
Example 2: Four on One
\usepackage{pgfpages}
\pgfpagesuselayout{4 on 1}[a4paper,border shrink=5mm,landscape]
Some remarks:
- 2, 4, 8 and 16 on 1 are available (for
resize tosee below) - The
border shrinkoption provides some space between slides - The
landscapeoptions is required depending on whether your pages are portrait/landscape.
\pgfpagesuselayout{resize to}[a4paper,border shrink=5mm]
Using resize to will resize any page to the selected page format (a4paper/letterpaper).
The package is quite limited in its functionality. However, since gpfpages is really easy to use and it’s a good choice in the most common situations.
Note, if you are using a table of contents, the page numbers may be wrong. To solve this issue, comment out the \pgfpagesuselayout{...}[...] command and typeset the document. This will set the page numbers right. Next you uncomment the line again and add a \nofiles command on a separate line. That will prevent Latex from overwriting “meta”-files and therefore leave the page numbers in your index untouched.