The first solution I saw was just to talk to a document creation service about painstaking create every single combination.  This wasn’t within budget.

After researching, I still did not have any solid solutions.  Apparently, because Adobe can charge so much for Acrobat, everyone thinks they can charge for PDF solutions. Don’t get me wrong there is a huge business need for PDF tools, but they all seem week and all look like a VB script. Trust me do a search for PDF concatenation and see what you get.

The solution I came up with was to use pdftk with PHP’s exec function. Since pdftk is a CLI solution, you have to be UBER careful using it with PHP’s exec with any kind of user input, as tampering could be devistating for your server.

The value in pdftk comes with the varity of platforms that are supported. So the solution will work with Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, FreeBSD, and Solaris.

Get ready for it, here’s the code.

$pdfMerge = exec("pdftk $execString cat output $fileName");

Basically, pdftk needs to be passed arguments like:

pdftk 1.pdf 2.pdf 3.pdf cat output 123.pdf

The $execString is the name of all the PDFs that need to be concatenated. I was creating this string with a foreach and used a similar method to generate the output filename.

I don’t know if this is the best solution for the job, but it’s the one that worked rather well for me.  I’d be interested to hear if any of you have better/smarter solutions.

What you do is open Terminal, which is found in Applications > Utilities. Then type the following:

sudo nano /etc/hosts

Terminal will then ask you for your password, because you have invoked the security privileges of the superuser. Type your password in. Nano will then open. I know you can use VI but for such a simple task, I prefer nano.

Next you will be presented with:
##
# Host Database
#
# localhost is used to configure the loopback interface
# when the system is booting. Do not change this entry.
##
127.0.0.1 localhost
255.255.255.255 broadcasthost
::1 localhost
fe80::1%lo0 localhost


Just a few things to note. A hash, #, is a comment. Don’t mess with those first 4, unless you know what you are doing.

Move the cursor down in nano using the arrow keys. Now you can type in an IP address of the staging server and have it appear to be on the production server domain name. Our theoretical staging server is on IP address 111.111.111.111 and our production server is on IP 11.111.111.112, with the domain www.production.com


127.0.0.1 localhost
255.255.255.255 broadcasthost
::1 localhost
fe80::1%lo0 localhost
111.111.111.111 www.production.com


Now save. This is done by hitting ctrl+o or ^o. Hit enter to name it hosts, then hit ^x to exit nano. In order for this to work the cache needs to be flushed. There is a new command for this in 10.5 Leopard.

dscacheutil -flushcache

Now you can go to your staging server via your production domain name. Handy. Just be careful though. Don’t accidentally make edits to production, or think you’re making edits on production but you’re making them to staging.

Make sure that there is a space added after every test or otherwise you’ll end up with the output test, test2, test3, test4, tes.

This could also be adapted into a function, if you wanted.

I upgraded first as I was prompted too. Pretty funny though.

In other news Hawk and Ananth drew me into one of their cartoons over at Applegeeks. Its funny and yes I do have a fudgem’s costume. Basically its a box… with faux fur over it. The fur was EXPENSIVE… oh well its Halloween, best college holiday.

Edit:  I’ve found another one… click here to check it out.