[OS X TeX] Can TeX help out here? Merging PDF with various page sizes and keeping it vector.

[Herbert Schulz]

On Jan 13, 2012, at 9:13 AM, Gerben Wierda wrote:

> Hello community,
> 
> I have the following problem. I need to create a single PDF file where each page may have a different size and orientation. Say the first page is A4 portrait, the second is A3 landscape and so on. Can TeX (either LaTeX or ConTeXt or plain TeX) help? Each page contains a PDF image of some random size that is inserted (e.g. with the pdfpages package in LaTeX).
> 
> I have been looking around for a solution but haven't found one. And using geometry and pdfpages is not enough, because you cannot change paper size mid-document with geometry. I also tried Create.app, the drawing program. And I tried a program call PDF Merge and some others. Neither of these work, and most of the merge programs out there maybe merged, but changed the nice vector images into pixel images, completely destroying print quality.
> 
> So, I am back where I started. Is there some fancy TeX trickery I could use to do this?
> 
> Summary:
> - One PDF as result
> - Each page has a different size and orientation
> - Each page contains a PDF vector image that is not to be converted to pixels
> 
> Yours,
> 
> G

Howdy,

Nice to see you are still around!

Try this. Put all the pdf files you wish to merge on your Desktop. Open one of the documents in Preview.app. Open the Thumbnail side bar for that window (View->Thumbnails [Opt-Cmd-2 in Lion]). Then grab and drop each of the additional images you want to merge directly onto the Thumbnail of the initial document (NOT below it but directly on top of the Thumbnail). That's it!

It seems to work well here; I merged a letterpaper page and Beamer pages into a single document.

PS: Assuming this works you can rearrange the pages by re-arranging the Thumbnails once the single document is created.

Good Luck,

Herb Schulz
(herbs at wideopenwest dot com)