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Re: Assembling PDFs into a PDF document?

  • To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
  • Subject: [mg121235] Re: Assembling PDFs into a PDF document?
  • From: Bill Rowe <readnews at sbcglobal.net>
  • Date: Mon, 5 Sep 2011 07:07:36 -0400 (EDT)
  • Delivered-to: l-mathgroup@mail-archive0.wolfram.com

On 9/4/11 at 6:05 PM, siegman at stanford.edu (AES) wrote:

>In article <j3vc2j$ek0$1 at smc.vnet.net>,
>Bill Rowe <readnews at sbcglobal.net> wrote:

>>>All I want to do is, in essence, import a bunch of files;
>>>concatenate 'em (without in any way opening, "reading" or in any
>>>way processing them); and re-export the concatenated file.

>>There are a variety of third party apps available for the Mac that
>>will do just this. Many are free or minimal cost.

>All right -- I guess what's surprised me is that no one so far has
>come up with a few lines of simple and straightforward Mathematica
>coding that can do this job simply and quickly.

Why should this be surprising? While Mathematica is a very
powerful tool, it is not the best tool for all purposes.

>After all, one is supposed to be able to carry out one's _entire_
>work flow of analysis, calculation, _and publication_ (including the
>inclusion of externally generated or provided content), entirely in
>Mathematica -- is that not the mantra?

That may be the mantra of some. But it certainly isn't mine.

>I just want to make a Mathematica-generated publication, to be
>exported in PDF format, that will actually have almost no
>Mathematica generated content -- maybe a title page or ToC -- but
>include a lot of externally generated content, in the form of PDF
>files.

>As I eventually realized, Plain TeX can do this easily.

Recall, Mathematica's Run function. That is you can invoke
command line TeX tools from Mathematica. So, anything you can do
with TeX could be done from within Mathematica if you like. In
fact, since Mathematica can be seen as a general purpose
programming language, you could actually create command line TeX
tools from Mathematica if you wanted. In principle, anything you
want to do on a computer could be done within Mathematica. But
this is hardly an efficient or easy way to accomplish many tasks
you are likely to want to do with a computer.





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