Creating PDF files?

[Per E. Johannessen]

Sent you a pm

[Pete]

Hi Per

Thanks for the PM, looks like a possible solution with a bit of work. I will have to see if my rexx skills (almost non-existent) are up to the job of creating a script or 2.

As the discussion is about creating pdf files all potential tools and methods are welcome.

While there seem to be several tools available I think all of them ultimately rely on ghostscript.
As such I ask you to post your PM, or allow me to post it in this discussion, for the benefit of all interested.


Regards

Pete

[Per E. Johannessen]

Hi Pete,

A sample of how to create indexes. These will be shown in the left pane of Lucide:

gsos2 -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -q -dBATCH -dNOPAUSE -sOutputFile=indexed.pdf index.txt -f orig.pdf

Create "orig.pdf" by merging these pdf's:

AA.pdf
AB.pdf
AC.pdf

Create "index.txt" in this format:

[/Page 1 /View [/XYZ null null null] /Title (Chapter AA) /OUT pdfmark
[/Page 2 /View [/XYZ null null null] /Title (Chapter AB) /OUT pdfmark
[/Page 3 /View [/XYZ null null null] /Title (Chapter AC) /OUT pdfmark

Very time consuming if you have lots of pdf's. If all the pdfs's to be merged/indexed are in one directory, and you want to use their  file names as index, then I believe a Rexx script could be very helpful. Export the directory content to a txt-file and use that file for creating the "index.txt".
Still a solution is needed for merging big quantities pdf's because of "command line" restrictions. Perhaps the txt-file created from the directory can be used as an input-file?

[Dariusz Piatkowski]

Hello Pete!

...Thanks for the screenshots, showed me where I was going wrong.
As to "Label" it shows in screenshot OS2_ePDF_setups.png - top line of ePDF Distiller setup window.
Thanks for the PDF docs, will have to spend a little time reading...

Yes, indeed, i got it now. That "Label" is nothing more than just a name you assign to the particular distiller profiler. So in my case since I have both GS 9.04 & 9.18, I had chosen to keep both of these configured.

...I can get PDFMergenX to start after displaying some messages

   XPDF: Unicodemap file is missing "j:\usr\bin\IBM-858.UnicodeMap"

Clicking OK results in a message that "Umlauts will be wrong!" - think I can live with that at the moment.

Seems I have some support files missing as I cannot get it to do anything...

Do I need XPDF installed as well?...

Hard for me to tell truth be told, the reason being: I do not recall explicitly installing it, and yet in the program directory I of course have multiple *xpdf* files...soooo...that makes me think I had some elements of it there and most likely it is all the pdf*.EXE files.

Now if I was doing this install today I would just use all the RPM package files instead, such as the various pdf*.exe files installed on my machine from the poppler-utils-0.90.1-1.oc00.pentium4 RPM package...LOL, time to do a little cleanup/optimization!!!

Take a look at the attached directory file listing for what I have, as well as the Settings=>View Components windows.

...I found a Components window which shows some files not found:-

   UnicodeMap (- the IBM-858.UnicodeMap)
   PSSELECT.EXE
   PMDIFF.EXE
   TIFF2PS.EXE

Any idea on where to find those files? - and is there any sort of Help/Inf about using the app anywhere? - trying to work out the format of a list (*.mpf) file...

1) PMDIFF.EXE is missing here as well
2) PSSELECT.EXE is in the program directory but also available from psutils-1.23-2.oc00.pentium4 RPM package
3) TIFF2PS.EXE is in the program directory but also available from libtiff-tools-4.7.0-1.oc00.pentium4 RPM package