>I am, however, still looking for a freeware/shareware/cheapware
>that will combine the multiple .pdf pages into a single document
>in an easy manner.
Although we bought Adobe Acrobat I think it is a little bit
boring with all this manual work for each patent.
Michael Engel gave very a valuable hint for PDCAT and with a
simple script this can be very useful.
So I wrote this script, which merges the single pages to one pdf-
file. Due to some technical problems it could only add three pages
to a pdf-file in one single step and this step is repeated until
all files are included. So, the program is really slow, but it
works - even for big patents.
Normally I am downloading with Lattice one or more patents in one
collecting-directory, one script is sorting them to individual
directories and a second script is looking for each directory,
merging the patents therein, moving them onto the server and
creating an new index-entry for the intranet web-server. In this
way it seems to be automated, without the need of Acrobat.
Take care that the long line "IF not EXIST temp_in.pdf ..." is
not word-wrapped.
Since I do not have access to Win95/98 I don't know if this will
work in that enviroment too.
Peter Koenig
--- snip here - save this file as merge.cmd or similar in c:\WINNT ---
@ECHO off
REM * Makes a DIR-Command of all PDF-Files and merges these files to ONE
REM * File "Packed_Patent.pdf". PLEASE STORE ONLY ONE PATENT per DIRECTORY!
REM * You need pdcat.exe (http://www.glance.ch/GSE/PDF/PDF_SMP.htm) and this
REM * cmd-file stored somewhere in your PATH-Enviroment ( e.g. c:\winnt ).
REM * It is really not fast, but it should not care for the number for pages
REM * of the patent ( maybe you should try WO-A2-9623010 over night ... ).
REM * Q&D, Peter Koenig 1999, pk@graffinity.com
DIR /w *.pdf | FINDSTR "pdf" > pdf_files.dir
FOR /f "tokens=1,2,3" %%i IN (pdf_files.dir) DO CALL :_ADDING %%i %%j %%k
DEL pdf_files.dir > NUL
REN temp_in.pdf Packed_Patent.pdf
ECHO.
ECHO Done! Packed_Patent.pdf created!
ECHO.
GOTO :EOF
REM *** SUBROUTINE, Adding three more pages to PDF-File
:_ADDING
ECHO Now adding %1 %2 %3 ...
IF not EXIST temp_in.pdf ( CALL pdcat -b -oT %1 %2 %3 temp_out.pdf > NUL
&& GOTO :_LEAVE)
CALL pdcat -b -oT temp_in.pdf %1 %2 %3 temp_out.pdf > NUL
:_LEAVE
COPY temp_out.pdf temp_in.pdf > NUL
DEL temp_out.pdf > NUL
:RETURN
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Dr. Peter Koenig
Graffinity Pharmaceutical Design GmbH Tel. 06221/64933-17
Im Neuenheimer Feld 515 Fax. 06221/64933-11
D-69120 Heidelberg e-mail pk@graffinity.com
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