Hi,
IMHO it is a useful feature however I'm not interested in money because
the bureaucracy around it would need more time than to develop the
feature. I might do it later, in a few days / weeks when I'm done with
the xmp bugfixes I'm working on.
However the "Testing only needs to be basic" part seems to contain much
more things than "reading from a file". We don't check for password
protected features, or for a page count.
I searched google whether the "reading from file" feature is available
from Picocli and didn't get a useable answer. Google seems to get worse
and worse. So I asked ChatGPT and yes it is possible.
The prompt was "Does picocli have a feature to get a list of files not
from the command line, but from a file containing lines with the filenames?"
https://chatgpt.com/share/694fee54-eb20-8006-b712-16d734640efc
Tilman
Am 26.12.2025 um 20:19 schrieb PDF Newbie via dev:
Hi. I’ve reviewed the documentation for the PDFMerger utility located here:
https://pdfbox.apache.org/3.0/commandline.html#pdfmerger
And it appears that it only accepts a list of input files on the command line
with the -i option. While this is good, I would also like to be able to pass a
list of file names (one per line), and have the list of files added to a single
output file specified by the already-existing -o option.
Why? The number of files I’ll be merging is larger than most UNIX/Linux shell
environments permit, and file names may be up to 68-characters long
(64-character string + .pdf), further reducing the number of files I can merge
within one command.
While I don’t particularly care how this is implemented, other open source
utilities follow the convention of prefixing an input file name with an ‘at’
symbol (‘@‘), or offer a separate option (“-l” / lowercase L) to specify the
file.
Testing only needs to be basic — before beginning, ensure all files described
in the list file exist, and optionally test the correctness/compliance of the
input PDF’s to ensure a defective merged PDF isn’t created, and ensure that the
input file doesn’t contain more pages than the PDF spec allows for, and
potentially adding a warning when files that contain incompatible options
(password protected features such as copying / printing, etc.) are added.
Given that the use case for this is commercial in nature, I’d like to offer a
bounty for this feature - I’m neutral as to which platform should be used for
posting / tracking / paying for this — just let me know which one. I’d prefer
to work with one of the core maintainers for the project, but other recognized
contributors are also eligible, my only requirement is that the change is added
to the main distribution. I’d also consider making a donation directly to the
project if that is preferred.
Thanks.
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