On Mon, 2008-05-05 at 07:51 +0930, Matthew Smith wrote:
> The one thing that would make my process easier is if I had a tool
> that
> could merge my PostScript or PDF files. Tried it using an art package
> (the Gimp), without success. I also tried a bit of raw PostScript
> programming a year or so back, but that just gave me a headache ;-)
There are many ways to concatenate PDF files -- unfortunately, none of
them are likely to be 100% reliable for strange edge cases. You can get
pretty darn close to 100% though with a few methods.
Take a look at the pdfjam package [1]. It comes with a bash script
called pdfjoin:
pdfjoin first.pdf second.pdf third.pdf --outfile joined.pdf
It uses pdflatex to do the voodoo and does so extremely well.
[1]
<
http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/sci/statistics/staff/academic/firth/software/pdfjam>
As an interesting aside, with "simple" PDF files, you can actually do
the following:
cat first.pdf second.pdf > joined.ps
ps2pdf joined.ps
ps2pdf will complain about errors but usually recover and provide a nice
concatenated PDF file. The pdfjoin script is much more elegant and
proper, however.
-Jeff