Pdf file manipulations

[wtb32141]

I want to register my copyright on a book I have written. If I register it electronically, then I must send them a file(s) of the book. They prefer 1 file. My book consists of 43 pdf files (1 front-matter file, 40 chapter files, a sources file, and an index file). I have read that Ghostscript can combine and compress multiple pdf files into 1 pdf file. If I do that, could one then open that combined pdf file with say Adobe Acrobat or Okular? I doubt it, for it would first have to be uncompressed. As you can see, I need some guidance.

[Qqmike]

You could make copies and conduct experiments.

[dibl]

LibreOffice Draw can open PDF files, and can do some editing. I don't know about file combining.

[jlittle]

I've never used it in anger, but pdfunite comes with Kubuntu, if you're happy using the command line.

[jlittle]

I also stumbled on this ask ubuntu discussion. The post about file size and compression might be relevant to you.

[chimak111]

I also stumbled on this ask ubuntu discussion. The post about file size and compression might be relevant to you.

+1

and remember to provide a destination file to pdfunite otherwise the last "in-file" will be overwritten according to one comment!

I tried it and didn't see what this comment reports:

~/Desktop/scratch $ ls -l
total 9404
-rw------- 1 chimak chimak  791815 Dec  8 09:11 01-jun.pdf
-rw------- 1 chimak chimak  792985 Dec  8 09:12 02-july.pdf
-rw------- 1 chimak chimak  795060 Dec  8 09:12 03-aug.pdf
-rw------- 1 chimak chimak  797549 Dec  8 09:12 04-sep.pdf
-rw------- 1 chimak chimak  827654 Dec  8 09:13 05-oct.pdf
-rw------- 1 chimak chimak  800964 Dec  8 09:13 06-nov.pdf
-rw-rw-r-- 1 chimak chimak 4805975 Jan 15 09:02 out.pdf
~/Desktop/scratch $

where out.pdf was the result of pdfunite *.pdf out.pdf. So thanks for mentioning pdfunite!

[papakanush]

I use pdfshuffler for combining pdf documents and reordering pages, if necessary. I'm not aware of any compression function with it, but I suppose there are other ways of compressing the file.

[woodsmoke]

Hi
Without getting into details i self-published 6 books for "the Christian home school" market about 8 years ago and there was some small interest but what I found was that they would just rather spend the cash for new or used books from one of the two major Christian publishing houses.

But...to the point I made each book as a set of PDF "chapters" which I numbered "biology 01" "biology 02" biology 03" etc and placed them in a folder.

I then used the "front end" of "pdfchain", there is associated software such as PDFTK which will also have to be installed and it may all come together using synaptic or whatever, I don't know your particular version of Kubuntu or Neon.

But, you just select the items in order they appear in a box and click "chain" and voila! it is there.

I really was just amazed at how simply and effectively it worked, however, others may contest that.

I DID NOT DO ANYTHING to the resultant file. I did ALL of the dirty work ahead of time, go it right and let it go at that.

BTW it paginated back then, don't know about now.

I, however, knew which page was going to be what and did have an index as the... third page.

It opens with Adobe Reader which is what most folks who use Windlows would use and it also opens in Okular etc. I did not find that the presently relatively sophisticated apps would do the job back then.

So, I am sure that the suggestions by other folks are quite on spot, but this is what I used, and it is what I will use to assemble a new book which I will sell through Amazon, using their publishing stuff they take a .pdf file.

As to compression, I would think that anybody would take a .zip file, dunno.

So, it has been a few years but I'll be glad to answer any questions which I can,

Here is an article that lists several apps to do what you want and has a nice discussion of PDFchain.

https://askubuntu.com/questions/2799...eral-pdf-files

I verified that it is in the repo for my Kubu version which is 14.04.

woodsmoke

[wtb32141]

Thanks everyone for your suggestions and advice. I read some more on the U. S. Copyright Office's site, and it said to send them a zipped file. My laptop is running Ubuntu 16.04. I have been using Dolphin as my file manager, but the version of Ubuntu I have comes with a file manager--I just had continued with Dolphin, which I use on my desktop PC. But one day I used the built-in file manager (the icon says "Files"), and I saw a menu entry that said "Compress". Dolphin lacks that menu option. Then I looked up at the top right-hand side of the dialog window that opened when I chose the "Compress" option, and several compress options appeared. One of them was ".zip", Each book's multiple files already were in a directory of its own.

So I chose the ".zip" option on each directory, and it put all of a book's pdf files into one zipped archive file, which solved my problem.

[claydoh]

Thanks everyone for your suggestions and advice. I read some more on the U. S. Copyright Office's site, and it said to send them a zipped file. My laptop is running Ubuntu 16.04. I have been using Dolphin as my file manager, but the version of Ubuntu I have comes with a file manager--I just had continued with Dolphin, which I use on my desktop PC. But one day I used the built-in file manager (the icon says "Files"), and I saw a menu entry that said "Compress". Dolphin lacks that menu option. Then I looked up at the top right-hand side of the dialog window that opened when I chose the "Compress" option, and several compress options appeared. One of them was ".zip", Each book's multiple files already were in a directory of its own.

So I chose the ".zip" option on each directory, and it put all of a book's pdf files into one zipped archive file, which solved my problem.

For what it is worth, Dolphin has the same functionality, though I could not tell you off hand if it works in a non-Plasma environment without additional dependencies. Select the group of files, or the folder, and right-click to see the this and other options.

[wtb32141]

On my laptop (Ubuntu 16.04), I right clicked on a folder and on a file, and no "Compress" option (or anything looking like one) appeared.

[Rog131]

On my laptop (Ubuntu 16.04), I right clicked on a folder and on a file, and no "Compress" option (or anything looking like one) appeared.

The Compress service/context menu is part of the Ark: https://www.kde.org/applications/utilities/ark/ .

Before the KDE Applications 16.08 the Ark had the traditional desktop files to make the 'Compress' & 'Extract' context menus.
After the KDE Applications 16.08 the Ark: https://cgit.kde.org/ark.git/commit/...359c1b4c86f66e

...The Compress and Extract service menus shown in Dolphin's context menu are now
provided by two new KFileItemAction plugins...

[woodsmoke]

Because of file size limitations in e-mails INTO the college from MS cloud I quite frequently must ZIP a file to get it to go through and it unzips fine at the college.
woodsmoke