Making one PDF of many

People who aren't lazy enough to have figured out how to use computers to save them work are really strange about using them to make lots of work for other people.

The director of the West Gallery Quire sent a mail to the list suggesting that everybody print their own music for the workshop next week, but providing only a link to a page with pointers to the individual pieces, and a list of the order it should be in.

So before breakfast this morning, I spent 20 minutes downloading the pdf's and writing a LaTeX program to put them in one pdf. I know there are other ways to do this, but this got me a title page with a list of the pieces.

I was greatly assisted in doing this fast by a latex file posted by Peter Flynn to the Nokia users list. He figured out how to put PDF's into a page exactly the size of the Nokia N810, and posted it.

After breakfast, I put my pdf file up on my website and posted a link to it. I'm sure people are a lot more likely to print one 23 page file than to chase 10 links and print them and put them in order.

Here's a skeleton for how to do it to print a a PDF on letter paper:

\documentclass[letterpaper]{memoir}
\usepackage[margin=0pt,nohead,nofoot]{geometry}
\usepackage{pdfpages}
\pagestyle{empty}
\title{Your title here}
\author{Your name}
\date{\today} %or use the date you want
\begin{document}
\maketitle
\clearpage
\includepdf[pages=-]{filename.pdf}
\end{document}

Of course, you substitute the name of your PDF file for filename.pdf, and you can have as many includepdf lines as you like.

Related posts:

1. Reading PDF files on a portable device
2. Reading PDF's on the N810
3. Wrote a program yesterday