[cl-pdf-devel] Embedding several PDF files in one document

[Klaus Weidner]

On Fri, Apr 23, 2004 at 12:42:46PM +0200, Marc Battyani wrote:
> "Arthur Lemmens" <alemmens at xs4all.nl>
> > My client wants to automatically generate
> > an abstract book that contains all the submitted abstracts
> > and starts with some kind of contents overview with the names
> > of the authors, titles of the abstracts, etc.
> 
> If you want formatted output you should use cl-typesetting, cl-pdf is only
> the rendering layer.

Another important question is if you need to modify the page
content of the articles you're merging, for example if you want
continuous page numbers throughout the document. This gets tricky if you
have no direct control over the individual layout. It would be easier if
you could tell the authors to use no page headers and footers at all.
Adding things to an existing PDF file in fixed locations is doable.

Do you need to automatically extract the abstract and metadata, or would
it be okay to manually extract that to generate the introductory
material?

> There are several tools that merge pdf files. May be it's a good idea to
> look at them to see what they do. For instance here is one in C++:
> http://thierry.schmit.free.fr/dev/mbtPdfAsm/enMbtPdfAsm2.html

There's also the pdftk, the PDF tool kit, which can merge and split
documents. It's GPL licensed.

> You will need to parse the pdf files. I have a crude pdf file parser but as
> I didn't used it for some time it probably need some work to be operational
> again. I didn't published it because it's not portable as it uses the parser
> generator of Lispworks. The lexer should also be replaced by a cl-ppcre one.

I also have a PDF file parser in CL, which I use to extract text from
documents. The language parsing is complete, but I haven't implemented
more operators than the few I needed. 

It doesn't use any cl-pdf code, but a wrapper layer could probably take
care of feeding the parsed code back to it for output. 

It's not currently open sourced, but I could ask my boss about that. It's
not exactly our core business area ;-)

-Klaus