[pdftex] post-pdf operations?

[Thierry Bouche]

Hello

Le dimanche 7 décembre 2003, à 00:53:49, Karl Berry écrivit :

KB> Hi Reinhard,

KB>     AFAIK, the graphics package has an option to extract a certain page
KB>     from an external document.  

KB> Thanks, I didn't know that.  Extracting pages is easy enough with gs
KB> anyway.

I don't know what you expect to do with your PDF pages, but honestly,
pdftex is really one of the best post processing tool, because it just
copies the page object from the original PDFs. In many cases, gs or
distiller will alter the content (changing compression formats,
suppressing invisible things, e.g.). If you're satisfied with the
quality of your PDFs, using pdftex for imposition is a rather safe way
not to alter them. On the contrary, if you want to do some purely
graphical tweaking before sending to the service bureau, e.g., you
might prefer to use distiller.

Notice that the graphicx package also works with plain tex. Pdfpages
is essentially a wrapper over graphicx, so that you certainly could reproduce
most of its features without latex.

KB> Ah, I didn't know about pdfpages either.  It seems it might be able to
KB> do the overlays too with sufficient options.

This might be where purely PDF/pdftex might help. PS is opaque, but
PDF is inherently transparent. If you include two PDF pages in the
same page, the first one should not hide the second one, as long as
there is nothing in the background.



-- 
Cordialement,
 Thierry