Need some image creation help

[Justin]

I have a pdf for a Sega Saturn Dragon Force manual. I have the game, but it was sold to me without the manual.

What I'm trying to figure out is if there is a free image program that will let me merge 2 pages together (Each page is its own pdf), and then print them double sided with other pages, just like the original manual. I have Windows XP and Mac.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

[macroidtoe]

Hmmm, I personally use Paint Shop Pro at home and a lot of Photoshop/InDesign for that sort of stuff at work, but GIMP always seems to be the main free image editing program I hear brought up.

If you can somehow get the individual pages as images rather than pdf -- your best bet is probably the "snapshot" tool in Acrobat Reader, which copies a selected area to your clipboard -- you could merge your pages together pretty easily in an image editing program. The only problem is that you might lose some image quality doing it this way.

Then you'd just print one set of pages, flip them over and load them back into the printer and print the other side. The tricky part would be figuring out which pages go together side-by-side and front-to-back when you remove the "staple." You'd want to do that before you even started pasting pages together.

It might work better if you can find a free pdf editor that will let you add one pdf to another as a second page. Then you could just load your combined pairs of pages in Acrobat, which has a "Print multiple pages per sheet" option under "Page Scaling" when you go to print. I'm not sure whether or not they'd come out the right size though, although they should all at least come out the same size.