On Wednesday 03 Sep 2003 11:19 pm, James Sparenberg wrote:
> On Wed, 2003-09-03 at 15:07, Vox wrote:
> > On September 1993 plus 3654 days Ronald J. Hall wrote:
> > > On Tuesday 02 September 2003 11:15 pm, Mark wrote:
> > >> I had thought about that. but then I decided not to do it that
> > >> way cause I'd end up having to edit and clean up too much. So I
> > >> chose the try the elegant lazy method. as it turns out when I
> > >> used "cat" do combine the files all I got was the first page and
> > >> a wee bit of the last page and that was all. don't know what I
> > >> did wrong.
> > >
> > > Mark, someone else mentioned that they did not think it would
> > > work because it was a binary format. That could be it. Otherwise
> > > the "cat" command would have worked.
> >
> >   I've actually used cat to concatenate binary files (.mpg)
> >   together...strict standards compliant viewers choke on them, but
> >   mplayer plays files created this way without much of a problem.
> > The real problem isn't that the file is a binary, but that the
> > reader of the file doesn't like headers-in-the-middle-of-a-file.
> >
> >   Vox
>
> I think (but I can't swear) that the problem is file headers.  The
> PDF has a header that gives data like length etc.  So when you cat
> them together the first header is wrong.  The second is in the middle
> etc.  I agree that the only way is to cvt to ps then merge then
> convert back to pdf.
>
> James

Probably, but not the only possible answer. Consider HTML. A file is 
defined to be:

<HTML>
blah blah
</HTML>

If you cat two pages together you get:

<HTML>
blah blah
</HTML>
<HTML>
blah blah
</HTML>

and that is not valid HTML. It's possible to build a browser that can 
read it, but a browser would not be expected to.

-- 
Richard Urwin

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