Split LaTeX/IEEEtran generated PDF files
Documents generated with the IEEEtran document class in LaTeX have a two-column layout. If you feel a need to convert each of those two-column pages into two separate pages with one of the columns on the left and a lot of white space on the right, you can use this tool.
Why would you want to do this? This provides huge margins for handwritten notes, such as in an educational environment.
I manage two "conference seminars" where students write papers, submit them anonymously, peer-review papers of other students (double-blind), re-submit, and give a talk on a conference day. There's also a tutor role, and a tutor will need to add many comments to early versions of the papers.
Since some documents contain floats that span both columns (pictures, tables), the script adds the original document at the end so that the full view of such objects is available; in the one-column pages those objects are simply cut in half.
You need to have LaTeX (the pdflatex command) installed, and you also need pdfinfo from the
poppler-utils package. The script has only been tested on a Mac but should work just fine on a
Linux system.
Download pdfcolsplit.py, make it executable, move it to a folder that is in your $PATH, perhaps
lose the .py ending.
Run
pdfcolsplit.py filename.pdf
to have the script generate filename-comments.pdf.
The Python script runs rm -r in order to delete the temp directory. Set
ASK_BEFORE_DELETE = True
to make it ask if you really want to delete; then hit Ctrl+C to keep the directory (the script shows the location).