Question

I’m writing a quick one-off web application for a friend using Rails 3.0.9. It’s a very simply organizational application that has the option to upload and store a PDF associated with an item. For example, the primary view of the application is a list:

• Group 1
  • Item 1 (Link to PDF 1)
  • Item 2 (Link to PDF 2)
• Group 2
  • Item 3 (Link to PDF 3)
  • Item 4 (Link to PDF 4)

This is all operational. PDFs are uploaded and stored in a directory: /railsapp/public/system/pdfs/

One of the functional requirements of this application is to select any number of PDFs (checkboxes off to the side, or similar) and press a “Print All” button to initiate the printing of any number of them.

For example, a user could select PDF 1, PDF 3, and PDF 4 then press “Print All” to print all of these PDFs in sequence.

Is there any way to accomplish this? It would also be acceptable to find a method/library that can be used in Rails to combine the selected PDFs, and print them “as one.”

Answer 1

Use the pdftk tool, the operation is cat (the one for which the link opens up). It would be something like this:

pdftk 1.pdf 2.pdf 3.pdf cat output 123.pdf 

This will merge 1.pdf, 2.pdf and 3.pdf into 123.pdf.