[sane-devel] Sugg: frontend to scan and append to pdf

[Jonathan Buzzard]

khk at khk.net said:
> As Henning and Andras have suggested, converting scans to a PDF
> document is trivial (even though I would not use TeX for this),
> appending to a PDF   is a totally different matter. This is a pretty
> complex job. You need a PDF library that allows you to read a PDF file
> and modify it's contents.
>
> There are a number of commercial packages that can do this, but they
> are all fairly expensive, and not open source. 

The trick is not to finalise the PDF (i.e. write out the XREF table) till
you are done adding the pages. Something of a limitation, but one
that most people could live with in at least the short to medium term.
Something like the Panda PDF library is just fine for this sort of
application.

As an interim measure if you wish to append pages to existing PDF's you
could always open a new PDF file, and copy the pages over from the
original before continuing, and when finished overwrite the original.

JAB.

-- 
Jonathan A. Buzzard                 Email: jonathan (at) buzzard.me.uk
Northumberland, United Kingdom.       Tel: +44 1661-832195