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

[m. allan noah]

the PDF::API2 library for perl is pretty useful. i use it to do this sort 
of thing everyday for our apps here. it can re-write the xref table, etc.

the problem is the freaking huge filesizes you will get. perhaps you 
should instead look at one of the multi-image in single file formats, like 
tiff. are you doing bw, gray, or color scans?

allan

On Fri, 12 Dec 2003, Jonathan Buzzard wrote:

> 
> 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.
> 
> 

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