[CTS 30] PDF Portfolio

[PhilterPaper]

(split out from CTS 29 #119) otrcomm commented Hello Again,

I forgot to ask, do you have any plans to add the ability to create pdf portfolios in PDF::Builder? I currently bundle pdfs into portfolios with Acrobat manually but would like a programmatic method.

Thank you, Murrah Boswell

[PhilterPaper]

PhilterPaper commented

I currently have no plans to assemble portfolios, in part because these can pull in non-PDF documents. If someone can point me to portfolio documentation that shows it's fairly easy to do, I might reconsider.

Note that if all you're doing is folding multiple PDFs into one combined PDF, there are utilities out there to do this, and PDF::Builder could easily handle this with just a little Perl code. See the contrib/ and examples/ code. This would only be for PDFs, and would not be a general portfolio.

[PhilterPaper]

otrcomm commented

Hello Phil,

My requirements are to bundle multiple types of documents into a portfolio that can represent a particular completed project. The PDFs in this portfolio have each been digitally signed so they can not be modified. Combining them into a single PDF would invalidate the digital signatures of each document.

I will be talking to a company called iText (https://itextpdf.com/en) about a java based tool they have developed to create PDF portfolios. I do not program in java, so that will be a learning curve just to evaluate their software and see how I might integrate it into my system.

Thank you, Murrah Boswell

[PhilterPaper]

PhilterPaper commented

Combining PDFs without invalidating their digital signatures (as well as incorporating non-PDF documents) sounds quite complicated, and is getting well beyond the warrant of PDF::Builder. Unless someone can show me that it's actually fairly simple, and it could take Builder capabilities to do, I don't see adding portfolio creation to PDF::Builder.

[PhilterPaper]

I currently bundle pdfs into portfolios with Acrobat manually but would like a programmatic method.

I would not be surprised if Acrobat offered either some kind of Command Line Interface or a programming (scripting) language, with which you could provide a list of PDFs (and other documents) to bundle into a portfolio, without having to do manual document-by-document insertion. Have you looked? They're really missing something if they don't offer this. This looks like it might be promising: https://www.datalogics.com/blog/pdfjt/pdf-portfolios-for-acrobat-dc-pdf-java-toolkit/