PDF workflow guidance

November 23, 2024 6:43 AM

Making a cookbook of old recipes, having lots of bottlenecks!

I thought this would be a pretty straight forward project. I want to scan my grandmothers recipe books and make a new version with a table of contents.

I have long used PDFPen for my PDF workflow, but this project may put an end to that. As an aside, I cant figure out a how that software survives? It has served me well for years, but I recently upgraded to the PDF Nitro for Mac version and having lots of difficulties. It seems the only real other option is Acrobat, but seems pretty expensive for my needs. Anyway...

I have scanned the pages into three different pdf files, I have used PDF Nitro to create a table of contents for each page and descewed an applied some image correction as well. The issue I am currently facing is that I cannot combine these pdf's, Nitro is just balking and the tech support is abysmal, so now I am thinking I have to do something different.

I realize I had no real reason to create the files as pdfs as I could have just made jpegs and built it all in Lightroom where I have created many books, but the table of contents would need a little figuring out.

I hope this is enough info and would love some guidance on best workflow to get this finished, approximately 150 pages total and the table of contents can be really simple, just recipe name and page number.

Thanks

posted by silsurf to Technology (14 answers total)

PDF24 online tools should be able to combine the pdfs. The desktop software is windows only.
posted by kathrynm at 6:51 AM on November 23

If the individual pages are the way you like them, can't you use Preview.app to combine the three PDFs (with the trick of dragging thumbnail from one file's sidebar into another file's sidebar)? Or have you already tried that?
posted by wenestvedt at 6:54 AM on November 23 [2 favorites]

Response by poster: One of the issues I have is that I cropped the images on each page, so now each page is a different size? I obviously want the pages to all be letter sized with the images just centered on them?

I have not tried Previw.app yet, will do
posted by silsurf at 7:13 AM on November 23

Response by poster: I just tried using preview, I can drag and drop the thumbnails to combine into a new docuemtn, but I lose the table of contents entries?
posted by silsurf at 7:36 AM on November 23

Response by poster: I tried merging them with PDF24Tools (amazing!) and still the table of contents entries are not saved. I think there is something in the way to TOC entries are embedded that I need to tend to? All I have done is select each page, then in PDFNitro "add Table of Contents Entry" typed in the recipe name and moved on, they all appear in the original pdf when I select the option to view Table of Contents, but dont seem to carry over to new documents?
posted by silsurf at 7:44 AM on November 23

I hope that PDFCombo still works, as its one job was to join PDFs while respecting ToC information.

(I have cymbals about processing images to PDF workflows on the command line, but no-one wants to talk about those)
posted by scruss at 9:11 AM on November 23 [1 favorite]

perhaps a blogpost how-to, scruss? Cymbals on a distant hill?
posted by clew at 10:19 AM on November 23 [1 favorite]

If the OP had a dual boot Linux machine or a friend with Linux then the poppler-utils would do all this and more from the command line (specifically the pdfunite command).

Just mentioning for future visitors to this question.
posted by forthright at 12:24 PM on November 23 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: PDFCombo is now PDFOutliner, cost $4.99 and I will give it a try. Thanks for the feedback, one larger question is am I doing this the right way?
posted by silsurf at 1:34 PM on November 23 [1 favorite]

→ am I doing this the right way?

If you're not utterly despairing of the tools and you feel a positive connection to the result, then I'd say yes. There's no one right workflow for everyone.

I'm not sure if pdfunite preserves bookmarks, though the poppler-utils are pretty amazing.

(distant cymbals, for those who might care about such fiddly things: ScanTailor Advanced for fixing (mostly B&W) page scans, img2pdf turns multiple images into PDF pages including padding/scaling, ocrmypdf to turn scanned typed/printed text into something searchable, poppler/qpdf/pdftk for the fiddly bits.)
posted by scruss at 2:27 PM on November 23 [2 favorites]

There may be also tools on ILovePDF that can help with some of what you need. (It's free.)

There are definitely other options/methods out there that would have made this significantly less painful, if you have any similar projects in the future. Generally, the workflow would be more like:
Scan > Deskew > Crop > Resize > Rearrange/Combine > Table of Contents
though it might vary depending on the originals and your software.
posted by stormyteal at 8:51 PM on November 23

Response by poster: Thanks everyone, very helpful. My question on the right approach is really whether to cut some loss and re-configure my project because I dont yet understand how to do the following once I have a combined pdf with a TOC (which I believe is now doable)

1. Since I have cropped many pages, how do I get them all to be letter sized again, I mean have the cropped image file on a letter sized background for printing?
2. Alphabetize the TOC?
3. Create an actual TOC page with page numbers?

OP
posted by silsurf at 5:46 AM on November 24

1) PDF creation will probably not break one image over two pages, so you might be satisfied with the results already. I’d be arrow-forwarding through the compilation to verify this before I started thinking about the ToC, personally, because if i do want to reorganize the sooner the better!

3) I would expect anything that knows about ToC entries to have an option to make the ToC pages, so I’d rummage through the menus or documentation.

(I have an inherited recipe scrapbook and want to do this myself - I’m in the command line world w/scruss, but you and I could compare notes to figure out where the hassle points are with each approach.)
posted by clew at 1:36 PM on November 24

if you were to start from the beginning, you could drag and order the images into a google doc or slideshow (you can change the aspect ratio of the slides to be the size of a normal portrait page), order them how you like, and download as PDF
posted by jander03 at 7:42 AM on November 26