A useful feature idea for PDF aficionados

[aurumdigitus]

This was inspired by XY's ability to deal with ZIP files. As PDF's are the lingua franca of the electronic era it would be niffy if the program could simply join two (or more) together. Nothing fancy mind you like deleting superfluous pages. Simply glue the selected files together.

What say you? This seems to fit within the concept of "file manager".

[highend]

I'd say: No.

Why? The next one wants splitting. The next one wants to extract specific single pages from multiple documents, etc.
Even more so: XY would need to know everything about the internal structure of these documents to accomplish such tasks (Don does avoids external dependencies whenever possible) -> Why reinvent the wheel...

Simple solution: PDFtk Server
free for non-commercial usage
command line client
portable, small

Get if from here: https://www.pdflabs.com/tools/pdftk-server/

Extract the .exe with e.g. Universal Extractor and then use a simple script...

Code: Select all

    $pdftk = "<your path to pdftk.exe>\pdftk.exe";
    $outputPDF = "<curpath>\combined.pdf"; // Change it if you like...

    if (<get "CountSelected"> > 1) {
        $exts = formatlist(regexmatches(<get "SelectedItemsNames">, "\.([^.]+?)$"), "sed");
        if ($exts LikeI ".pdf") {
            run """$pdftk"" <selitems> cat output ""$outputPDF""";
        } else {
            status "The selection contains NON .pdf files, aborted!", "8B4513", "stop"; end true;
        }
    } else { status "Not enough .pdf files selected, aborted!", "8B4513", "stop"; end true; }

[aurumdigitus]

Wow! You certainly fore-filled my wish - and then some. Will do as you advise and recant the request.

As the song goes, "You gotta know when to hold 'em and know when to fold 'em". Am grateful for the time and effort you put into this cause.

(And think of all the work you saved Don. )