editing .pdf files.

iAlta · 09-16-2007, 09:49 AM

IS there a way to take the first page of several PDF files and put them in one PDF file?

b0uncer · 09-16-2007, 09:56 AM

Surely is, but there are threads about "editing PDF files" already so be kind and search+read them first..

PDF files are not actually meant to be "edited", even though there are apps that can do things for them. Better get the originals, which you should have access to anyway if you are permitted to use them (and if you aren't, you shouldn't be asking), edit them and re-export to new PDF file(s). You can read more about PDF on the net, like in Wikipedia for example, to understand why it's not supposed to be edited like some Word document..

Note that there probably isn't any tool around that can do 100% clean job. Each one I've tried messes something up, most of the time I just get lucky and it's not visible in the output. The best way around is to simply get your hands on the originals and edit them..

EDIT: probably the most legal way you can do this is buy an expensive licence for Adobe Acrobat's newest version; I recall some version of it was able to do things like this. But like I said, if you don't have the originals for the PDF, you probably aren't the legal owner of the work, which means most of the time that you aren't - according to copyright laws - supposed to be editing the file, so..

iAlta · 09-16-2007, 10:05 AM

I was think about taking the first page of the Vista ELUA* from different languages and put them in one PDF file, for convenience of printing, instead of just printing the first page of each file.
I defeneetly don't have copyright on that...

* Where is says retailers have to refund the cost of the OS if you don't accept the agreement(which I don't).

osor · 09-16-2007, 02:07 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by iAlta

IS there a way to take the first page of several PDF files and put them in one PDF file?

Yes, this should be easy to do with Ghostscript. For example,

Code:

#!/bin/sh
# takes as arguments a bunch of pdf files
# produces as output the value of the environment variable OUTPUT
# if no such variable exists, then “outfile.pdf” is used

if [ -z "${OUTPUT}" ]
then
	OUTPUT="outfile.pdf"
fi

TEMP=$(mktemp -d)
count=1

for file in $@
do
	gs -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -dNOPAUSE -dQUIET -dBATCH -dFirstPage=1 -dLastPage=1 -sOutputFile="${TEMP}/${count}.pdf" "${file}"
	count=$(expr $count + 1)
done

cd ${TEMP}

gs -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -dNOPAUSE -dQUIET -dBATCH -sOutputFile="${OLDPWD}/${OUTPUT}" $(ls | sort -n)

cd ${OLDPWD}
rm -rf ${TEMP}