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batch files...compiling pdf's

Fayd

Diamond Member
Okay, so..

i need to find a way to compile 1500ish pdf's into 300 pdf's. the 1500ish pdf's are arranged in order in which they need to be compiled already, being numbered xxx-y.pdf, where xxx is the site number and y is the numbered order in which it has to be compiled.

cover sheets have been named xxx.pdf... i will need to rename them to xxx-0.pdf.

but anyways, i've been searching online for some batch files to do this. what i've found will compile everything in a folder..and that's not exactly what i need.

the site numbers have been already done properly. the only issue is.. i dont know how to change what variables get passed to the pdf writer, so i dont know how to get it to do 1 group at a time. and also, i dont know how to get it to move onto the second group.

what i have been doing (mind you, this is a pentium 2 with 128mb of ram i'm working on) was using acrobat 2000, opening the cover sheet, and individually appending the files with each of the file's assosciated files. (for every cover sheet, there is 6 assosciated files) so, as you can imagine, that was taking forever.

while i was searching, i've learned of a faster way, using pdfblender, and creating the pdf's that way. while it's much faster than acrobat (allows me to merge by group), it's still doing it by hand, and it's frustrating doing something so mundane by hand when i know it can be automated.
 
Download and install Ghostscript: http://sourceforge.net/project...iles.php?group_id=1897 (click the link for gs854w32.exe).

Now, you can use a command like this to generate a combined PDF (called "combined.pdf" in this example) from a bunch of other PDFs (called "file1.pdf", "file2.pdf" in this example):

gswin32 -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOutputFile="combined.pdf" file1.pdf file2.pdf file3.pdf

Now you just have to figure out how to write a script to execute all of these commands. I'm inexperienced with DOS programming unfortunately, so I probably can't help you with that. If you're using UNIX, though, let me know and I can probably help you write something.




 
i just thought about something.

if i installed cygwin, i should be able to use unix style commands...right? cause i'd have a bash shell to work with...
 
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