Calculation Compiler

[T_Bat]

Hello - we have been using a in-house program written in VBA (with excel) that takes separate PDF's and compiles them into booklets with an automatic table of contents, chapter titles, etc. We'll generally us this to compile calculations packages for submittal. We have having issues with the program on a few machines and I'm interested in seeing what's out on the market that performs something like this. Does anyone know of an existing software that does this. To be clear - I don't need a program to simply merge PDF's, but one that can automatically create a cover page, chapter title pages, table of contents given a set of inputs and list of PDF's.

Thanks for the help,

 

[xnuke]

I use a version of LaTeX (MikTeX) with the package pdfpages to do this very thing. I use TeXnicCenter as my IDE and use the LaTeX to PDF output profile. My source file has project info that automatically creates a title page, and a line to include the pdf of every product we normally use and create a TOC entry and a hyperlinked bookmark. I just comment out the lines for the products that aren't in a particular project. It can't pull in any pdf markups, though, so those need to be added to the compiled output pdf. I simply use a copy and paste action from the original of each product pdf to do that, though, which goes pretty quickly.

xnuke
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[ChorasDen]

How skilled are the individuals in your office with writing code? Basic .NET experience can get you to develop your own tool with just a couple hours of work. In the past, I've been happy using the open source C# package called "PDF Sharp" to write out my own custom pdf's for report building, but they also have their open source "MigraDoc" package which might be more what you are looking for.

If written into a standard winforms or console app, I can't imagine what you are trying to do would take more than a couples hours of programming.

 

[peter_engiio]

Curious what you landed on? Have you found anything that does it all?

 

[T_Bat]

Sorry for the slow reply folks. I'm sure we could re-develop our own code, but honestly I'm looking for a piece of software we can get off the shelf. While we can do some basic coding, and it sounds fun to develop, our time is currently best used for design projects. I know we are only talking a couple of hours, but with our market the way it is, we can barely afford to spare any work hours. We don't have to do calc packages enough to make developing our own worth it right now. If anyone knows of something out on the market that can do what we want - that's what we are looking for. Otherwise this one will go in the "future project for when things slow down category".

 

[IRstuff]

One thing that might be cumbersome is your VBA implementation, which is not exactly the easier, or widely used, language. One possible alternative is Python, which has a much simpler syntax and gobs of open source and user community support; Python even has a purpose-built function for merging PDFs. AND, Python is FREE!!!

https://realpython.com/creating-modifying-pdf/#concatenating-and-merging-pdfs

https://caendkoelsch.wordpress.com/2019/05/10/merging-multiple-pdfs-into-a-single-pdf/

https://docs.aspose.com/pdf/java/add-toc-to-existing-pdf-in-python/

https://pypi.org/project/pdf.tocgen/

https://realpython.com/pdf-python/

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[IDS]

One thing that might be cumbersome is your VBA implementation, which is not exactly the easier, or widely used, language.

I disagree. VBA in Excel is in my opinion by far the easiest language I have found for custom application development, and it is still very widely used in engineering, just not by people who are full time developers.

I have been using python regularly for about 4 years now, and it has some useful features, but it also has some features I really dislike, and I am still much more productive in VBA than python.

Doug Jenkins
Interactive Design Services

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[3DDave]

"We have having issues with the program on a few machines"

What issues are those?

 

[ChorasDen]

@IDS, I chose not to respond to IRStuff initially, but in general, I agree with pretty much all your statements. While I don't personally like coding or reading VBA, (I prefer C based languages, and the other .NET architecture, C#), I strongly dislike writing or reading Python code. The amount of packages that are required to be downloaded, (along with vetting their contents), as well as the fact that the language method calls seem to change fairly routinely, strong dissuade me from using Python any further.

I think Python is a very acceptable language for writing short code snippets, but for developing anything with more than say 100 lines of code, I strongly suggest using other languages.

 

[peter_engiio]

From a quick search it seems like most PDF generators are built around the idea that a developer would use it (via their API). This makes sense if you ever had to build PDFs programmatically; it can be gnarly for above average complexity scenarios.

What are the requirements for something like this? Is it to specify/upload some PDFs and this thing would merge them (in a certain order) and create a table of contents out of these?

Is it always "merging" PDFs or would it have to work with other types of documents (like Excel/Word)? Where would the cover page come from? Is that something that's generated once or would it have to be dynamic for each report?

"table of contents given a set of inputs" -- examples for these kinds of inputs?

(I may be interesting in building something like this if I fully understand the requirements)

 

[T_Bat]

Thanks everyone... responses below:

"We have having issues with the program on a few machines"

What issues are those?

We have some new machines that are theoretically set up like all others, but the VBA debugger opens immediately and we can't really do anything with it. I'm not sure the original developer of the tool still works for us and with no knowledge of the programming we can't really dubug. I'd like to avoid the hours of figuring it out make future use and maintenance someone else's problem (hence an off the shelf product).

What are the requirements for something like this? Is it to specify/upload some PDFs and this thing would merge them (in a certain order) and create a table of contents out of these?

Is it always "merging" PDFs or would it have to work with other types of documents (like Excel/Word)? Where would the cover page come from? Is that something that's generated once or would it have to be dynamic for each report?

"table of contents given a set of inputs" -- examples for these kinds of inputs?

It would only need to work with PDF's. The inputs for our current table of contents allow us to modify the date, title pages, some limited formatting (margins, blank pages, etc.).

It's honestly a great tool and fairly robust, but as it ages we have more bugs.

 

[MintJulep]

We have some new machines that are theoretically set up like all others, but the VBA debugger opens immediately and we can't really do anything with it.

In all likelihood all you need to do is check a few references in the Tools|References dialog.

 

[rather_be_riding]

Might be a crazy idea but could you use a common virtual machine or something of the kind to alleviate your issues with different machines? I'm not suggesting this as a gold-plated solution but it might be a sufficient bandaid to keep you working on the important stuff instead.