joining multiple PDFs into one

[Christopher Browne]

On Mon, Nov 14, 2011 at 12:53 PM, Thomas Milne
<thomas.bruce.milne-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> How to do this?
>
> I tried cat file1 file2 file2 > file, but that didn't work, I only got
> the last page.
>
> Solutions I find on Google all either refer to Acrobat or some other
> Windows software. One I found with Openoffice referred to inserting
> the PDF's into an ODT file then exporting, my Libreoffice doesn't have
> the ability to insert PDF.
>
> Any ideas?

Well, cat will happily append together whatever sets of files you ask
it to append together.

Whether or not a particular piece of software can cope with that is a
separate question.  PDF files have a structure that is intended to
allow certain kinds of manipulations, and something like Acrobat or
pdfkit may be of assistance in doing that.

It's quite entertaining that xpdf and Adobe Reader do different things
if you splice two PDFs together using /bin/cat; that tells me that the
result of such splicing is somewhat ill-defined, and, furthermore,
that trying to use /bin/cat to do this is pretty much a mistake.  Just
because the results are somewhat predictable doesn't mean it's wise to
do it, and, actually, in view that each program turns out to *ignore*
different parts of the resulting file shows that they both have
undesirable behaviour.

And it should be *somewhat* intuitive that it's silly to try to "cat"
things together and to expect this to work out.

- If I run "cat /bin/perl /bin/python > /bin/perl+python", should I
expect to be able to run Perl and Python?
- If I run "cat something.doc something.xml something.xls something.ps
something.pdf > conglomerate", is that conglomerate meaningful, at
all?
- If I run "cat archive1.tar.bz2 archive2.tar.bz2 > archives.tar.bz2",
can I expect to run tar *or* bunzip2 against this, meaningfully?

There was a time at which people were imagining we might do stuff kind
of like this; look up the history of OpenDoc, which imagined that we'd
be building compound documents.  KParts, in KDE, does something kind
of similar, but this is one of the famous failed Apple projects.
(With the successes, of late, people imagine Apple can Do No Wrong; I
daresay that OpenDoc is a fine counterexample.)
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