Homebrew PCBs

On Mon, 2008-05-05 at 07:51 +0930, Matthew Smith wrote:
> The one thing that would make my process easier is if I had a tool
> that 
> could merge my PostScript or PDF files. Tried it using an art package 
> (the Gimp), without success. I also tried a bit of raw PostScript 
> programming a year or so back, but that just gave me a headache ;-)

There are many ways to concatenate PDF files -- unfortunately, none of
them are likely to be 100% reliable for strange edge cases.  You can get
pretty darn close to 100% though with a few methods.

Take a look at the pdfjam package [1].  It comes with a bash script
called pdfjoin:

pdfjoin first.pdf second.pdf third.pdf --outfile joined.pdf

It uses pdflatex to do the voodoo and does so extremely well.

[1]
<http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/sci/statistics/staff/academic/firth/software/pdfjam>

As an interesting aside, with "simple" PDF files, you can actually do
the following:

cat first.pdf second.pdf > joined.ps
ps2pdf joined.ps

ps2pdf will complain about errors but usually recover and provide a nice
concatenated PDF file.  The pdfjoin script is much more elegant and
proper, however.

-Jeff