How to Print a Poster from a PDF on macOS Using the Command Line

For users who prefer a graphical interface, using the command line might seem daunting. However, for tasks like creating posters from PDF documents on macOS, the command line offers a powerful and efficient approach, especially when using tools like mutool.

Before diving in, ensure you have Apple’s command-line developer tools installed. If you don’t, Homebrew, a package manager we’ll use, will prompt you to install them. Homebrew simplifies the installation of software on macOS and will be used to install mupdf-tools, which includes mutool. This installation leverages Apple’s developer tools to compile software optimized for your Mac, whether it’s an Apple Silicon or Intel-based machine.

To get mutool, you need to install the mupdf-tools package using Homebrew. It’s important to note that mutool isn’t directly available in Homebrew’s main repositories but is part of the larger mupdf-tools package. Installing mupdf-tools brings along several dependencies necessary for its operation. You can install it using the following command in your Terminal:

brew install mupdf-tools

Once installed, the mutool binary will reside in /opt/homebrew/bin on Apple Silicon Macs or /usr/local/bin on Intel Macs. To use mutool commands directly, you might need to ensure these directories are included in your system’s PATH environment variable, allowing your shell to locate the executable.

Now, let’s get to printing your poster. The mutool poster command allows you to take a PDF and arrange its pages into a poster format, spanning multiple sheets of paper. For example, the command below will take original.pdf and create poster.pdf, arranging the content in a 3×4 grid layout.

$(which mutool) poster -x 3 -y 4 original.pdf poster.pdf

This command instructs mutool to arrange the pages of original.pdf into a poster with 3 columns and 4 rows, outputting the result to poster.pdf. You can then print poster.pdf to assemble your poster. Be aware that, depending on the PDF and viewer, you might encounter blank trailing pages.

For more detailed options and functionalities of mutool, you can consult the manual page available online.

mutool is also offered as an optional component during the installation of MacTeX, a TeX distribution for macOS. This provides another avenue to access mutool if you are involved in TeX typesetting.