Reviewing Papers: Adding a note Page after each page in PDF programmatically

Written on September 13, 2022

I had this brilliant idea of adding a cornell style note page after every single page of a paper I am reviewing. Because why not, right? Everyone loves tinkering around the reviewing process instead of actually reviewing, so … there.

Turns out that it is fairly simple to do this programmatically using python these days. You need a PyPi packaged called pypdf2 package before, and a template style cornell page that you can generate from here.

You are golden at this point. Here are the steps:

1. Setting Up Environment

cd <your favorite directory>

# create a virtual environment
python3 -m venv venv

# activate the virtual environment
source venv/bin/activate

# install the PyPDF2 package
pip install pypdf2

2. Script to Add Pages

from sys import argv
from PyPDF2 import PdfMerger, PdfFileReader
import sys

def add_pages(input_pdf_path: str, template_pdf_path: str):
    input_pdf = open(input_pdf_path, "rb")
    page_count: int = PdfFileReader(input_pdf_path).getNumPages()
    template = open(template_pdf_path, "rb")
    merger = PdfMerger()

    print("original page count: " + str(page_count))
    for i in range(0, page_count):
        print("adding templatr page at "+ str(2 * i + 1))
        merger.append(fileobj=input_pdf, pages=(i, i+1))
        append_index = (2 * i) + 1
        merger.merge(position=append_index, fileobj=template, pages=(0, 1))

    template.close()
    input_pdf.close()
    write_file(input_pdf_path, merger)

def write_file(input_pdf_path: str, merger: PdfMerger):
    with open(input_pdf_path+"merged.pdf", "wb") as out:
        merger.write(out)
    merger.close()

def main():

    print(sys.argv)
    if len(sys.argv) != 3:
        print("Please specify the absolute paths to the input file and template file")
        print("Format: add_comment_page input_pdf_path template_pdf_path ")
        exit()
    input_pdf_path = sys.argv[1]
    template_pdf_path = sys.argv[2]
    add_pages(input_pdf_path, template_pdf_path)

if __name__ == "__main__":
    main()

Aaand that’s all folks!

Code, Helper Script, requirements.txt for pip, and Cornell Style notepage as PDF are available in this GitHub repo link as well, so get going!

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