Help with PDF files please

Poststructural Pub
1

A while ago I bought a CD-ROM containing scanned images of some early issues of the sadly defunct Concertina and Squeezebox magazine.

Lots of interesting stuff in there, but the trouble is that each page has been scanned separately and made into a separate PDF file. About 30 PDF files per issue. Which makes browsing the material something of a pain.

The best way I found of perusing them was to load all the pages from one issue into Acrobat reader and then selecting pages from the window menu as wanted. It sort of worked but was still not a very enjoyable reading experience.

Can anybody suggest a simple way of either concatenating the PDF files, or extracting the scans from them and arranging them into an easily browsable format? (Preferably one that does not involve purchasing the full version of Acrobat.)

Many thanks,
Steve

2

Some scanning software, that comes bundled with scanners, allows you to do multiple scans, then makes them into one pdf. Epson software, for example. Yes, you’d have to re-scan them, but you wouldn’t have to buy full Acrobat, which is the way to go. That’s the only way I can think of.

But Stevie, since you are a published music editor anyway, you oughta just bite the bullet and get Acrobat. it’s certainly relevant to your business…

Ask a friend who has the CS Suite. You can just install Acrobat and it’s not as big a kind of theft as Photoshop, even though its still wrong, wrong, wrong.

3

It partly depends on the PDFs. You may or may not be able to cut and paste the contents into another app, depending upon the security settings.

However, if you can get your hands on a copy of the full version of Acrobat at least temporarily, it is possible to construct a full-text index which spans all of the PDF files you have. You can then use this index – with just plain Reader, not full Acrobat – to do cross-PDF searches. I think this is probably closest to what you want.

4

Thanks for the suggestions gentlemen.

A knight in shining armour who owns Acrobat read this and has offered to try to fix the files for me. If he can’t make large files, then the index will be the next suggestion.

I agree Weeks the full version would probably be useful to me but if I can possibly avoid learning another new piece of software, reading another manual, or operating a new gadget (other than a musical instrument), I will!

Cheers
Steve

5

The index will give you features that a single large file won’t have (e.g., word stemming in the search) and is easier to produce as well, I think.

6

You can certainly concatonate PDFs easily and quickly with the full version.

  1. Open the first document.
  2. Select the Document menu → Pages → Insert
  3. Click the “After” radio button.
  4. Click OK.
  5. Rinse, repeat
  6. Save.

It’s easy.

7

I was about to do the same; contact me if it doesn’t work out.

8

It worked and was a cinch.

For others who have Acrobat and want to create a single PDF from many separate PDF files, the easiest way (in Acrobat 6, which is what I use) is the following:

Choose File > Create PDF > From Multiple Files

Then click “Browse” to locate the files to combine. In the case of Steve’s CD, all of the pages were in folders, one folder for each issue of the magazine. So I just browsed to a folder, clicked on the first file, shift-clicked on the last file to select all of the files in the folder, and then clicked OK. Five seconds later I had a PDF that combined all the pages into one file, in proper numerical order.

By the way, starting with Acrobat 6, the multi-file indexing function is only available in the “premium” more expensive version (Acrobat Professional), not Acrobat Standard.

Signed,

Yr. Faithful Servant,

Sir Bradalot

9

So true. If they didn’t pay me to do this stuff, I wouldn’t know any of the answers, either. Notwithstanding the supposed 10% of brain matter we use, mine’s all used up already.