sob

Son of Binderator

Model

Son of Binderator (SOB) is a Java-based graphical tool for bookbinding, specifically for cleaning up PDFs into a form suitable for printing, either as a simple output document or as foldable / stitchable binding signatures (sections). Arbitrary page ranges of source PDFs can be combined and transformed with scaling, rotation, various forms of cropping, and horizontal and vertical translation. An arbitrary combination of transformations can be applied to any page or set of pages, with cumulative effect. An inline (ICE)PDF viewer can be used to see the effects of transformations, live, as slider controls are used to change values, without regenerating an output PDF file on every change. Bookbinding signatures can be generated with variable spine and edge offsets, to a variety of page sizes.

SOB has been tested on Windows, Linux and Mac environments and is actively developed on an Apple Silicon machine. To install and run, download and install Java 19 (or a later version if you prefer) from Oracle and then either download a runnable release jar and double click on that, or check out the source and build the maven package target to produce a runnable jar.

All documentation is currently inline under the Help menu in the running application.