[pdftex] PSUtils equivalent for pdftex output.

[Tigran Aivazian]

On Tue, 13 Apr 2004, John Culleton wrote:

> In times past I used EPS files and plain TeX to make up 
> music booklets. Now I am trying to change  to using png 
> files and pdftex.
> 
>  But I am caught in a dilemma. If I say \pdfoutput =1 then 
> the very useful PSUtils such as psbook and psselect won't 
> work, because the output is in pdf form of course. 

I had the same dilemma and I found that using the excellent package called 
pdfpages provides almost all the functionality from psbook that I needed.

In fact, the only missing bit of functionality was the support for Hebrew 
(i.e. right edge) binding but I emailed the author Andreas Matthias 
<amat at kabsi.at> about it and he fixed this in a matter of few minutes 
(i.e. added a new option signature*= which handles right-to-left binding).

> If I say \pdfoutput=-1 then the output is dvi but I cannot 
> include png graphics.
>  
> If there were a set of pdf utilities similar to PSutils then 
> my problem would be solved.  But the name pdfutils has been 
> used to designate a simple text to pdf convertor.

I wrote an utility pdfbook.c before I discovered pdfpages package, but I 
believe the latest version of pdfpages completely supersedes it, so I 
threw it away. Out of curiousity, you can download it from here, if you 
want to:

  http://www.bibles.org.uk/pdf/misc

> The process of creating a pdf file, then converting it back 
> to ps for further manipulation seems a bit clumsy. but 
> right now that is the only game in town. 

That conversion is an awful thing to do because it can lose a lot of 
useful features from the PDF (depending on how complex is your PDF).

Kind regards
Tigran