chemoleo - 3-11-2004 at 09:55
Well, I managed to obtain a selection of very good ebooks, but they are divided in several chapters, which is kinda annoying, particularly if you are
trying to search the whole document.
So how do I go about merging those chapters into one document? I haven't much used Acrobat Writer, so please in simple terms. What version do I
need at least? Or can I use alternative programs?
Also, are official documents sometimes protected from edititing (i.e. preventing me from merging the pdfs)? Or is that impossible?
Oh, and am I correct in assuming that there is a copy of A.W. on the FTP?
[Edited on 3-11-2004 by chemoleo]
Tacho - 3-11-2004 at 10:08
I create PDFs using pdf 995. It's free and has worked nicely for me. One of the softwares in the suite (pdf edit)is supposed to allow you to merge PDFs. I never
used it though.
Good luck.
Mephisto - 3-11-2004 at 10:57
> So how do I go about merging those chapters into one document?
Merging some PDF-files to one PDF with Adobe Acrobat Professional: File > Create PDF > From Multiple Files > selected and sort the PDFs,
which should be merged > et voilà
> Also, are official documents sometimes protected from edititing (i.e. preventing me from merging the pdfs)?
Yes, PDF-files could be protected in many different ways. You can check the security settings for your document by clicking: File > Document
Properties > Security. The security-settings could be only hacked by a time-consuming brute-force method, but sometimes they could be ignored (if
printing isn't allowed but extracting of the content is allowed, you can extract the content to a new PDF and print the new file).
> Oh, and am I correct in assuming that there is a copy of A.W. on the FTP?
The program you need is there:
/upload/Acrobat 6 Pro and cracked DjVuDocExpress.zip
Polverone - 3-11-2004 at 11:16
Actually, the security settings on PDF files are trivial to bypass. The reader just needs to ignore the effects of a certain flag in the document.
Adobe's ebook format used a more complicated security scheme. When I needed to disable security settings on a PDF to apply OCR and recompress it
as JBIG2, I used a patched version of Xpdf to help me out. I converted the PDF to unencumbered PostScript with the patched Xpdf, then ran it through
Acrobat Distiller, converted page images to TIFFs, ran them through OCR, recreated the PDF, and applied JBIG2 compression. What a workaround!
The patch to Xpdf that I used can be found at http://vzzbx.xs4all.nl/pdf.html. Unfortunately, you will need a Unix-like system to get full functionality from Xpdf.
chemoleo - 3-11-2004 at 11:19
Ah, thanks a lot for your replies! That should sort out all my woes!
Will test it later tonight hopefully, and will get back on this. THanks.
Awesome!
chemoleo - 3-11-2004 at 17:59
Even though the individual documents do not seem to allow 'Document Assembly', pdf995 does not seem to care! It didn't
seem to be a problem at all to combine 18 pdf's into one single one, now sizing 7.2 MB!
Looks like the FTP is going to get a nice bit of extra information!
Oh... the only thing I might do is to add a single page, or edit the first page of the pdf, with some graphic or something... comments anyone? Acrobat
writer good for that? (I yet need to download it, don't have a proper FTP client installed yet)
Mephisto - 4-11-2004 at 02:53
With the 'Text Field Tool'-button in Acrobat Pro you can insert some additional info (for example on the title page), if you think
that's necessary. It doesn't matter if your PDF is a text-pdf or picture-pdf, the text field tool works in both cases.
Maybe you can compress your PDF even more, if it consists of black/white-pictures. Use Silx for this; if it's not on the ftp, I'll upload it
to /upload/Mephisto/, but I can't reach the server now. It's a plain command line tool and there's no quality reduction after
compression.
What's the title of your ebook?
chemoleo - 4-11-2004 at 04:54
Oh actually it's not a single one, there are a few more to come - mainly superb biochem textbooks. This was just a testcase.
Do let me know the command for the compression tool. It's b/w only.
Mephisto - 4-11-2004 at 05:44
I attached the PDFCompress tool to this post, because I can't reach the ftp today. Has anyone else this problem?
The command is very easy: "pdfcompress input.pdf output.pdf", and the tool will generate a new, compressed PDF from the original PDF.
Attachment: PDFCompress.rar (414kB)
This file has been downloaded 629 times
S.C. Wack - 8-11-2004 at 08:21
Can't get the .exe part of that .rar to work on my Windows system, btw. After extracting to a folder, then clicking on the icon, the box appears
then disappears in a blink. Never had that problem with such command line files before. So don't scratch your head if you see huge (75MB) JBIG2
pdf's from me.
Mephisto - 8-11-2004 at 09:13
As it's a command line tool, you need an open dos-box before starting the program. There you can type-in the command mentioned
above. If you just double-click on the icon, the box will be closed immediately.
Alternatively, you can create a new .TXT file, type-in the command and rename it to 'batch.bat'. By clicking twice on this file, the process
will start automatically with the proper command. That's very comfortable especially, when you got a lot of (small) PDFs to compress. In this
case, the content of your batch-file can look like this:
pdfcompress 1.pdf compr1.pdf
pdfcompress 2.pdf compr2.pdf
pdfcompress 3.pdf compr3.pdf
Note: In this simple example, the .exe-file, the .bat-file and the pdf(s) had to be in the same folder, naturally.
[Edited on 8-11-2004 by Mephisto]
S.C. Wack - 8-11-2004 at 11:23
I've been using moron-friendly programs, then. The last time I took computer classes, the Radio Shack TRS-80 was state-of-the-art.
Got it to work, so a comment - the OCR'd compressed version of a b/w test was only marginally smaller than an OCR'd version of the same
300 dpi tifs in JBIG2 lossy. However, the JBIG looked obviously worse. Mephisto's file should be downloaded more. Thanks!
EDIT:
Just did a much larger 848 page file and the compression is huge! Without OCR it is 8.71 MB. But I had to break up the pdf to feed it to the
compression program - anything larger than 400 pages, it would run forever or I'd get the "needs to close" message. Smaller than that
and it only takes a minute.
[Edited on 8-11-2004 by S.C. Wack]