[lug] pine-file-append-pdf-what!?

[John Karns]

On Sat, 8 Sep 2001, Rob Mohr said:

> Recently my financial monthly report has been emailed to me as a *.pdf.
> So I use pine and export-save into a file in /home/usr.  Not caring to
> read the report just yet, I save several during the month.  Overwrite or
> append?  I pick the append. And I back up the file in the home directory,
> too.  It gets larger in file size. But on my first inspection via adobe
> viewer, a problem.

What I would do is break it up again into its original components.  I
would suspect that one would be unable to merely concatenate various pdf's
and expect that they would view as pages of one large document, with
similar results if one were to try this with any other type of
(enhanced-ASCII) document files, whether it was Staroffice or MS's
counterpart.  The reason being that although there is ASCII within each
component file, it is essentially contained within an "envelope" specific
to the application, which would specify formatting details such as no. of
pages.

You should be able to reverse the process with an editor or even with
'less' which accomodates writing selected segments to disk.  It
shouldn't be too difficult, but the trick would be to correctly
distinguish each segments original boundary.

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John Karns                                        jkarns at csd.net