[lug] Combining pdf documents

[Kenneth D. Weinert]

On Tue, 14 Jan 2003 17:51:02 +0100
rm at fabula.de wrote:

> On Tue, Jan 14, 2003 at 08:14:40AM -0700, Kenneth D. Weinert wrote:
> > On Tue, 14 Jan 2003 15:30:56 +0100
> > rm at fabula.de wrote:
> 
> Hmm, as far as i understand 'Page Labels' are dictionary objects
> used for page navigation -- modifying those will modify the navigation
> tree, _not_ the numbering showing up on the pages (_unless_ your PDF
> tool inserts pdf specials to use the page labels instead of hardcoded
> string objects -- does any of the tool you know do this?).

	Unless it's changed in the newest PDF spec, I'm looking at
section 7.3.1 of the 1.3 spec:


	Each page in a PDF document is identified by an integer page
	index that expresses the page's relative position within the
	document. In addition, a document may optionally define page
	labels (PDF 1.3) to identify each page visually on the screen
	or in print.


	Maybe it was different in earlier versions of the spec (or
more recent ones.) In practice, though, I've seen very little use of
page labels. You can you have a page label when you see something in
the "current page" page box of your viewer that looks something like
"iv (12 of 398)" (I don't remember the exact appearance, but the point
is you get both the label and the index in the display.)

> For the index display, yes. But you would also need to search and identify
> the string objects that represent the page numbers created by the word
> processing application (it might be possible with some sort of
> heuristic ...).

	Very true - the page number could be showing up just as
content on the page and those would be a bit (a Titanic sized bit :)
more difficult. 

	Hmmm, here's an idea - you could take in the original page,
shrink it, and add header/footer information to every page. By far the
easiest way to do it, and I think I've even seen some open source
tools to do that. It's much easier because, in essence, you're just
treating each page as an object and putting it on another page.

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