joining multiple PDFs into one

[Terrence Enger]

On Tue, 2011-11-15 at 13:45 -0500, Bill Heagy wrote:
> I just did a quick experiment.  With cat f1.pdf f2.pdf > f3.pdf,
> acroread f3.pdf showed the first file, xpdf f3.pdf showed the second 
> file.  Anyone who lived with DOS and eof markers on text files
shouldn't 
> be surprised that more structured files do not always concatenate.

I am reluctant to enter a discussion which is generating so
much back-and-forth, especially when all I bring is
possibly-flawed memory of a long-since-outdated (version 1.2
perhaps?) specification.  Nevertheless, here goes.

The .pdf format that I remember is to be interpreted from
the tail end: the last thing is a pointer to a list earlier
in the file, each element of that list points to objects
presumably still earlier in the file.  It was done this way
to falicitate update by appending.  Just append a list of
pointers to the objects you want to be visible in your
version; some of those may be in the file you started with,
some may be ones that you added onto the end of the file you
found.

Okay.  Time to don my nomex underwear.

Terry.


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