ETOOBUSY 🚀 minimal blogging for the impatient
PDF::Reuse - deep diving in the past
TL;DR
A little utility to merge PDF files, with Perl.
So I needed to merge a few PDF files into a single one. And I knew that I already wrote about it, only in a galaxy very far far away… that has disappeared in the meanwhile.
Or has it?
Thanks to the Wayback Machine, I could actually access a useful
snapshot of the glorious perl.it and find a blog post from 2007 Unire
file PDF (“Join PDF files”). Here’s the program, leveraging module
PDF::Reuse:
#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;
use PDF::Reuse;
prFile();
prDoc($_) for @ARGV;
prEnd();As noted in the comments of the post from 2007, this can also be implemented through Ghostscript (if available), like this:
#!/bin/sh
gs -q -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOutputFile=- "$@"Now don’t trust me, try yourself!
It tends to produce slightly bloated files, while the Ghostscript-based solution is more efficient space-wise… use whatever you find better and applicable!