Merge PDFs easily with Perl

Today Idiscovered an easy way to merge PDFs files using Perl.

In my current project, I have to automatically generate a technical documentation from my perl modules PODs. It's easy to create one PDF file for each modules, but then I need to merge them all in one.

The very easy to use CAM::PDF Perl module provides appendpdf.pl. However it can only merge 2 files together.

I've copied and modified it for my need, and renamed it mergepdf.pl

Download : mergepdf.pl

Usage :  appendpdf.pl [options] file1.pdf file2.pdf ... fileN.pdf outfile.pdf

See the help for more options.

Comments

[Leifbk]

Sounds like a great idea. But aughtn't it be called catpdf as it is rather analogous to the cat command?

[rtheb]

`gs' utility from app-text/ghostscript-gpl suite should be also suitable here, if I've got the point properly.

gs -dNOPAUSE -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOUTPUTFILE=report.pdf -dBATCH title.pdf chapter1.pdf chapter2.pdf ... chapterN.pdf

Thank you for your work, anyway.

[Jochen Hayek]

there is also PDFSAM "split and merge" -> www.pdfsam.org .

[dams]

@Leifbk : just rename the file to catpdf.pl if you want :) But the cat command by default outputs to STDOUT whereas the script outpus to a file (which can be STDOUT if you give it the special "-" name). Anyway that's why I called it mergepdf and not catpdf

@rtheb : ah true, I could use ghostscript here, but it's just not installed on my mac right now

@Jochen Hayek : I used to use PDFSAM, but as far as I know you have to use it from the Graphical interface, and I need to automate (script) the process. Or can you use it from the command line ?

[Chris Dolan]

I'm the author of CAM::PDF. You can also do it as an almost-one liner:

perl -MCAM::PDF -e'$p=CAM::PDF->new(shift);while(@ARGV){$p->appendPDF(CAM::PDF->new(shift))}$p->cleanoutput("out.pdf")' *.pdf

[Patrick]

As I recently learned, this can also be done with ImageMagick:

convert file1.pdf file2.pdf ... fileN.pdf outfile.pdf

[dams]

@Chris Dolan : Thanks for the very useful CAM::PDF ! indeed, the one liner you propose is all what it needs, but a help message and the options you originally put in appendpdf.pl are useful.

BTW I proposed the script as new feature on CPAN. Not sure if you want it or not in the distribution.

[mark]

If you ever need a little more sophisticated arragement of PDF pages, I would recommend a look at the pdfpages package for pdfTeX:

http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/macros/latex/contrib/pdfpages/

[Gordon]

What I would like to know is how to remove the background image from PDF pages and change the main font colour. A lot of presentations in PDF format have a solid dark colour background and white text, but that wastes a lot of ink printing out, even when you do 6 slides per page.
Of course now days a lot of people would just read the PDF on their phone, but I would still like the option of printing them out.