HELP!!! Need help combining PDF files for the Manual Project

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Larry Peterson

Larry Peterson

SPFG, Supreme Picture Framing God
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Bill Henry sent me manual pages for Oval Master and Psitorius VN-J. He scanned them into separate PDFs and sent me a CD with all the pages.

I can't figure out how to combine them (without spending any money ). I was told that they can be combined in Photoshop but if so, I can't figure it out. Everything I read for CS4 tells me in can't be done.

I found this link ( http://creativebits.org/acrobat/create_a_pdf_presentation_from_photoshop ) but there is no "PDF Presentation" menu item in CS4.

There are free PDF combiners online but they all have size limitations (we have 300 MB between the two manuals ).

Can anyone help with this.

I can either post the files online (300 MB) or forward the CD (preferred) or show me a link that explains how I can do it with available online tools.

Thanks
 
When you have a Mac available with OSX 10.5 or 10.6 you can simply open one file in "Preview" and drag all required other files into the sidebar to make one big new PDF again. If required you can change the following by dragging up/down again.
 
Rick Bergeron - CPF said:
Larry,

I use PDFedit995 to combine pdf files but I don't know if there is a filesize limit.

You might try downloading the free version to see if it will handle that filesize.
Click to expand...

Well it works, sort of.

Its a real hokey set of programs. You install one and then it tells you to install another. I ended up installing 5 or 6 programs. When I was done combining, I was left with HUGE PDFs - one was 195 MB (and 75MB and 35MB).

There was no economy of scale when combining. The source files were 195MB total and the combined file was 195MB

There is a compression module available - supposedly = but when I tried to run compression from pdfEdit995 it told me a compression module was needed and then took me to a page where there wasn't a compression module.


I need to find a compression program or a better combination program. I can't put 195 MB files up there.
 
Peter Odems said:
When you have a Mac available with OSX 10.5 or 10.6 you can simply open one file in "Preview" and drag all required other files into the sidebar to make one big new PDF again. If required you can change the following by dragging up/down again.
Click to expand...
Wow, thanks for that tip, Peter. So I guess that means you can also create multi-page PDFs by scanning directly into Preview?

:cool: Rick
 
Rick Granick said:
Wow, thanks for that tip, Peter. So I guess that means you can also create multi-page PDFs by scanning directly into Preview?

:cool: Rick
Click to expand...

As far as I know this only works with dragging. If you inserted a wrong file, you can not drag it out again. Than you have to select it and choose "delete".

"Preview" is very flexible in this. By dragging you can add many types of files, like images. This is handy for making a report. The final file can be saved again as you like. In PDF, JPG or all types "Preview" offers.
 
If you have one of the full Acrobat programs (mine is an old Acrobat 7 Standard), you can open one of the PDF files, then click the word "DOCUMENT" on the menu bar, then select "Insert Pages". By this method you can build multi-page PDF files easily. The full Acrobat programs will also reduce file size somewhat, but I've found better results by converting the finished file to JPG, reducing resolution, then converting back to PDF.

You could also ask for JPG or TIF scans, combine and size the pages, then convert to PDF.

Another roundabout method might be to paste the PDFs (as images) into a Microsoft Word document, shuffle the pages, then convert to PDF.

If I can help, send the files to artframe@att.net.
 
Larry,

I scanned both of the documents @216 ppi – admittedly large, but especially because of the quality of the VN-J manual (my original is a lousy photocopy), I thought it was necessary to be able to zoom in at least two times in order for the reader to be able to decipher some of the characters.

Both were scanned in color which added to the file size. However, the OvalMaster manual has many pages that have black printing on a brown background. I felt that an effort to knock out the color and turn it into a grayscale would have “blobbed” out the illustrations and made some of the text more difficult to read.

I still have the files, so if you want me to change the 216 ppi scans into a lower resolution, I can do it. Just tell me what resolution you would like them and I can resubmit them.
 
Bill Henry- said:
I still have the files, so if you want me to change the 216 ppi scans into a lower resolution, I can do it. Just tell me what resolution you would like them and I can resubmit them.
Click to expand...

Why don't you try them at 100 dpi. The original PDFs were 12MB per page. To be workable, they shouldn't be any more than about 2MB per page.

Thanks
 
Okay, you win! :icon11:

I’ve resized the manuals to 100 ppi and converted them to grayscale. I also wiped off the cobwebs and figured out a way to combine each file into a single document. The combined OvalMaster document (16 pages) is a little over 10 Mb in total.

I’ll try to email them. If the email hiccoughs, I do the snail-mail route again.
 
WTG Bill

Bill Henry- said:
Okay, you win! :icon11:

I’ve resized the manuals to 100 ppi and converted them to grayscale. I also wiped off the cobwebs and figured out a way to combine each file into a single document. The combined OvalMaster document (16 pages) is a little over 10 Mb in total.

I’ll try to email them. If the email hiccoughs, I do the snail-mail route again.
Click to expand...


WTG Bill, These skinny new puppies are great. 195MB down to 10MB. What a diet. Got them up on the site too. :beer:
 
Larry Peterson said:
I can't figure out how to combine them (without spending any money ).

Can anyone help with this.
Click to expand...

I see you've got your problem solved, but in the future feel free to let me know about any PDF related issues, as I have full Acrobat. It will combine and compress PDFs at the same time and do a whole bunch of other neat tricks.
 
David N Waldmann said:
I see you've got your problem solved, but in the future feel free to let me know about any PDF related issues, as I have full Acrobat. It will combine and compress PDFs at the same time and do a whole bunch of other neat tricks.
Click to expand...

I found my licensed copy of Acrobat today and it is ancient - Acrobat 5.0 (copyright is 2001) . I installed and tried it on the big puppies that Bill sent me and I was able to combine the PDFs with it but I couldn't find any ability to compress with this version. Compression probably came later.

So I can combine now but I will have to rely on David for compression.

BTW, for any contributors, set your resolution to no more than 100dpi. If the generated PDFs are any more than a meg or two a page, they need to be rescanned with slimmer settings.
 
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