joining multiple PDFs into one

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Wed, Nov 16, 2011 at 12:32:40PM -0500, Christopher Browne wrote:
> 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?

No.  But it should run perl.

> - If I run "cat something.doc something.xml something.xls something.ps
> something.pdf > conglomerate", is that conglomerate meaningful, at
> all?

No.

> - If I run "cat archive1.tar.bz2 archive2.tar.bz2 > archives.tar.bz2",
> can I expect to run tar *or* bunzip2 against this, meaningfully?

Yes.  Both tar and bzip2 (and gzip for that matter) specificly allow that.

> 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.)

Some document formats are just designed to be nicer to deal with.

-- 
Len Sorensen
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