Acrocat: A utility for concatenating files into PDF format

Acrocat: A utility for
concatenating files to PDF format
Eric Woudenberg, Fall 2001
(eaw@connact.com)

Summary

Acrocat is a command line (Bash, DOS prompt, etc) based utility that uses Adobe Acrobat to concatenate multiple files into a single PDF file. Each input file occupies a new page of the output PDF file, except in the case where the input is a PDF file itself, in which case the input PDF's pages are inserted, in order, on separate pages in the output file. Acrocat handles input files in .gif, .tif, .jpeg, .bmp, .png, .pdf, and even .html and .txt format to some degree -- any format that Acrobat 5 can open. Acrocat requires that Acrobat be installed on your machine (Acrobat is available for purchase from Adobe).

Usage

acrocat [options] <input file1> [<input file2>] ...

  options: -o <file.pdf>  ; name output file (default 'out.pdf')
           -v             ; verbose, show DDE commands being sent to Acrobat
           -s <file>      ; don't send DDE commands to Acrobat, just store them to a file
           -l <file>      ; don't generate Acrobat DDE commands, load them from a file
           -e             ; show DDE error/result values (not reliably reported, unfortunately)

Details

Acrocat produces DDE commands (ASCII strings) and sends them to Acrobat 5 to perform the work of concatenating the files. The -s switch causes the DDE commands to be saved in a file instead of being sent. The -l switch causes the DDE commands to be read from a file instead of being generated from the command line arguments. These modes can be useful for examining or modifying the operations to be conducted. By default, Acrocat creates a file named out.pdf, the name of this file can be changed with the -o switch.

Download

You may download the executable or the executable and source package.

Recompiling

The executable can be built by running "make.bat" (assumes MS Visual C is installed) or simply by typing "gcc -o acrocat acrocat.cpp" (assumes GNU/Cygnus utilities are installed).

Caveats & Bugs

Acrocat has only been tested under Windows 2000.
If Acrobat has already been started by the user, acrocat will sometimes use it (rather than starting Acrobat itself). This mode of use is buggy. It is best to run acrocat without Acrobat already running, letting acrocat start Acrobat itself.

Motivation

I wrote this in order to make the Minidisc Patents page. With over 1000 tif files that needed to be combined into some 96 PDF files, I refused to take the "drag 'til you drop" approach afforded me by the Acrobat GUI.

Credits

This program was developed directly from the Adobe Acrobat 5.0 SDK examples, downloadable from http://partners.adobe.com/asn/developer/acrosdk/acrobat.html.