pdfpages produces additional blank pages and \AtBeginShipout\AtBeginShipoutDiscard doesn't fix

Question

I am trying to include twice an A5 landscape PDF with pdfpages. Unfortunately I get a bunch of blank pages. Here is MWE.

\documentclass[A4paper,final]{minimal}
\usepackage{fullpage}
\usepackage{pdfpages}
\begin{document}
\pagestyle{empty}
\includepdf[nup=1x2,doublepages=true,pages=-]{imposed-nup.pdf}
\end{document}

Here imposed-nup.pdf is a two-page A5 landscape document, and one would expect to get an A4 document of two pages. However, pdflatex produces a document of seven pages! Using \AtBeginShipout\AtBeginShipoutDiscard suggested as in this page removes two blank pages out of five, but I still get three blank pages.

The .log says, among other things,

<imposed-nup.pdf, id=1, 845.0471pt x 597.50829pt>
File: imposed-nup.pdf Graphic file (type pdf)
 <use imposed-nup.pdf>
Package pdftex.def Info: imposed-nup.pdf used on input line 6.
(pdftex.def)             Requested size: 845.04504pt x 597.50682pt.

so I suspect the fact that the fact that the page size of the included PDF is "too large" is causing the problem. I tried templatesize option but it didn't fix the issue. Any idea on how to get around this problem?

Answer 1

This is how you should use it:

\documentclass[a4paper]{article}
\usepackage{pdfpages}
\begin{document}
\pagestyle{empty}
\includepdf[nup=1x2,doublepages=true,pages=-]{imposed-nup.pdf}
\end{document}

The differences are:

• The \documentclass should be article, not minimal. See Why should the minimal class be avoided?

• The paper size (now that you're using article) should be a4paper, not A4paper;