[Pythonmac-SIG] Concatenate PDFS's with python

[Dinu Gherman]

Tim Conner:

> I'm looking for some print house type solutions that use 
> coregraphics/quartz and python to manipulate images, eps's, and pdfs. 
> To get started on this quest it would be nice if someone could point 
> me to examples or write a quick sub-routine that would take 2 pdfs and 
> combine them into 1, 2-page pdf. I just need a stepping stone to get 
> me rolling. I also need the same thing for jpegs, but once I see a pdf 
> example, I should hope I can handle that on my own.

I tried that on 10.2 using NSPDFView or something like that and
it just did not have the right methods to accomplish that kind
of task, i.e. picking/displaying single pages from a PDF would
work, but not reassembling them in a new PDF file. I'd be grate-
ful to know if that changed on 10.3...

OTOH, there is ReportLab's PageCatcher module which I used to
work with, but which has changing "usage philosophies", i.e. it
used to be a standalone product, then it was bundled into some
huge enterprise product, then it became sort of free for members
of the ReportLab Developper Network. Now I'm pretty much lost...
See also the links below.

   http://python.net/~gherman/RLTK.html
   http://www.reportlab.com/pagecatcher_index.html

In former times I had written a Mac OS X app named Papaguino,
which was a GUI around PageCatcher. Its still around, but re-
quires a Python installation in /usr/local/bin. I could well
repackage Papaguino into a pure Python app, but given the
PageCatcher licensing uncertainties, I'm not very eager on
doing that.

   http://python.net/~gherman/Papaguino.html

Finally, you may want to try PDFpen which was recently reviewed
favourably in a magazine, although it might be slow on huge docu-
ments... It seems like it does all that Papaguino does, plus a
few more things:

   http://www.smileonmymac.com/pdfpen/

Hope that helps,

Dinu

--
Dinu C. Gherman - http://python.net/~gherman
......................................................................
"The best way to predict the future is to invent it." (Alan Kay)