Combine multiple PDF's with proper paging?

[Bradley_Plett@adobeforums.com]

I'm very new to Acrobat, so please forgive me if this is trivial or has been answered 1000 times already! I searched but couldn't find an answer.

I have a number of PDF files that I would like to combine into one PDF for sending to a printing company. Combining them is easy enough, but the document will be printed duplex (i.e. both sides of the paper). It is important that the first page of each "sub-document" (think chapters in a book :-)) starts on the front of a page, leaving a blank page before it if necessary. There are too many "sub-documents" to do this manually. Can it be automated?

I am a developer, so I'm not scared to script or code it if necessary. I just need to find a way to produce the desired end result.

Thanks!
Brad.

[Sid_Steward@adobeforums.com]

[email]Bradley_Plett@adobeforums.com[/email] wrote:

> I'm very new to Acrobat, so please forgive me if this is trivial or has been answered 1000 times already! I searched but couldn't find an answer.
>
> I have a number of PDF files that I would like to combine into one PDF for sending to a printing company. Combining them is easy enough, but the document will be printed duplex (i.e. both sides of the paper). It is important that the first page of each "sub-document" (think chapters in a book :-)) starts on the front of a page, leaving a blank page before it if necessary. There are too many "sub-documents" to do this manually. Can it be automated?
>
> I am a developer, so I'm not scared to script or code it if necessary. I just need to find a way to produce the desired end result.
>
> Thanks!
> Brad.

Here is an idea. Create a blank page and save it as a single PDF
document. Write a script that counts the number of pages in each
sub-document. If the sub-document has an odd number of pages, append
the blank page to the end. When it is done, combine all the
sub-documents to yield your completed PDF.

If you have Acrobat, you could do this with JavaScript and batch
processing, I suspect. Or VB and Acrobat OLE, or Perl and Acrobat OLE,
or ...

If you don't have Acrobat, you could do this with pdftk, which you could
use to report the number of PDF pages and then append the blank PDF page
as needed.

HTH-

Sid Steward

[Bradley_Plett@adobeforums.com]

That would be a perfectly acceptable solution. However, as I've said, I'm new to Acrobat. I could really use an example or some sample scripts/programs. We have Acrobat, and I'm comfortable with pretty much any language (though the final solution will probably be in VB.NET). If I could just find a bit of documentation on scripting and/or a sample or two, I'm sure this would be easy.

Brad.

[Bradley_Plett@adobeforums.com]

OK, I got this mostly working thanks to <http://www.planetpdf.com/mainpage.asp?WebPageID=47>

One minor problem remaining: how do I programmatically create a blank page? I would think this would be trivial, but having searched extensively, I haven't found anything that helps. As a kludge/work-around, I've created a pdf file containing a blank page, but that's not exactly an elegant solution! :-)

Brad.

[Sid_Steward@adobeforums.com]

[email]Bradley_Plett@adobeforums.com[/email] wrote:

> OK, I got this mostly working thanks to <http://www.planetpdf.com/mainpage.asp?WebPageID=47>
>
> One minor problem remaining: how do I programmatically create a blank page? I would think this would be trivial, but having searched extensively, I haven't found anything that helps. As a kludge/work-around, I've created a pdf file containing a blank page, but that's not exactly an elegant solution! :-)
>
> Brad.

Whoops- Sorry about the lack of document ref.s.

In Acrobat JavaScript, you can create a new, blank page by executing:

app.newDoc( 612, 792 )

where the arguments give the page size in points. You could measure one
of your sub-doc's pages, first, to ensure a good fit.

You can access Acrobat JavaScript methods from VB, according to
technical note 5417: Programming Acrobat JavaScript Using Visual Basic.
This seems to be part of the Acrobat SDK documentation.

The Acrobat 6 SDK docs require a membership, but the Acrobat 5 SDK docs
do not. All sorts of other goodies, too, if you plan to program Acrobat:

[url]http://partners.adobe.com/asn/acrobat/download.jsp[/url]

The Acrobat JavaScript spec. is technical note 5186:
[url]http://partners.adobe.com/asn/developer/pdfs/tn/5186AcroJS.pdf[/url]


Sid Steward

[Bradley_Plett@adobeforums.com]

Oddly, trying to create a blank page is turning out to be more difficult than merging the documents! I've been able to create a blank page from the JavaScript console using "app.newDoc", but haven't figured out how to access the app object from the JSObject.

Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks!
Brad.

[Bradley_Plett@adobeforums.com]

More information: I'm able to create a new document with a blank page using "jso.app.newDoc(612, 792)", but the COM object that is returned is not the new document. I'm not sure what's returned, but it doesn't work in "InsertPages". Also, now when I close Acrobat it asks me whether I want to save the new, temporary document. I assume that if I can somehow access the new document, I should be able to close it without the prompt, but....

Brad.

[Sid_Steward@adobeforums.com]

[email]Bradley_Plett@adobeforums.com[/email] wrote:

> More information: I'm able to create a new document with a blank page
> using "jso.app.newDoc(612, 792)", but the COM object that is returned is
> not the new document. I'm not sure what's returned, but it doesn't work
> in "InsertPages". Also, now when I close Acrobat it asks me whether I
> want to save the new, temporary document. I assume that if I can somehow
> access the new document, I should be able to close it without the
> prompt, but....

According to the Acrobat JavaScript docs, you get a "Doc Object"
returned from app.openDoc. Maybe the problem is that it's a
"JavaScript" PDF document and not a "COM" PDF document object? Have you
tried manipulating it with the JavaScript Doc object methods (e.g.,
closeDoc insertPages)?

Sid Steward

[Sid_Steward@adobeforums.com]

Brad-

Here is a little JavaScript I wrote that works on a single document. If
the current document has an odd number of pages, it adds a blank page to
the end that takes the same dimensions as the last page.

In Acrobat 5, I wasn't able to use it with batch processing due to a
curious bug in Acrobat (I found a workaround here[1]). I haven't tried
it in Acrobat 6, yet.

Anyhow, I hope it helps-

Sid Steward

if( this.numPages % 2 == 1 ) {
last_page_i= this.numPages- 1;
crop_box= this.getPageBox( "Crop", last_page_i );
new_doc= app.newDoc( crop_box[2]- crop_box[0],
crop_box[1]- crop_box[3] );
this.insertPages( last_page_i, new_doc.path, 0, 0 );
new_doc.closeDoc( true );
}

[1] [url]http://www.planetpdf.com/mainpage.asp?webpageid=1515[/url]

[Reinhard_Franke@adobeforums.com]

Hi,

I don't understand that you try to make it so complicated. In the documentation you will find that newDoc don't work with JSO and that it don't work in every case.

You may create a sorted file list for the files you want to merge (including Blank.pdf at the places you need it). Then insert all files based on the file list. This gives you a high flexibility, regarding sorting, inserting from different directories, easy producing different versions, .... The Blank.pdf you may store into the unavoidable dir \My Documents\Adobe ...

Maybe in PdfTK you can use then: pdfTK <FileList.txt cat output MyBooklet.pdf
Sid may know if that works, otherwise write a short programm or I may spend you a WSH/VBS to handle it.

HTH, Reinhard

[Bradley_Plett@adobeforums.com]

Thanks a lot for your help. I'm quite surprised that there isn't a simple "newPage" method on the PDDoc object, but.... Anyway, I've got what I need even if it's not as pretty as I'd like! :-)

Thanks again!
Brad.