Yesterday, I asked MapInfo-L if anyone knew how to print multiple maps to a single PDF document, and it appears that this is possible, although the methods are a bit tricky. There are also free tools that can be used to bind multiple PDF files into.
The first method is to create all output pages in a single multi-page layout window. If you can arrange the pages carefully so that all the margins are aligned perfectly, then MapInfo will create a multi-page PDF when output is sent to a PDF printer device. The other technique is to use a PDF printing device that supports appending pages to an exisitng file. Choices mentioned include Adobe's Acrobat, PDFEdit and others, but most people reported that this is hard to set up correctly. Finally, there are tools that allow you to merge exisitng PDF or postscript files into a single PDF document. Choices include Adobe Distiller and the free pdftk. Here's the respnses if you want to learn more: --- Kent Hargesheimer: The GeoPrinter utility is set up to print one page at a time, however there is a check box option to concatenate which will add one additional page at a time to the same PDF file name.a I'm not sure if you could totally automate changing this setting in any way, but you could probably make it at least 'semi-automatic' where the user just has to select the file they want to add to and that setting each time. You can download it at http://www.geoprinter.com. --- Mats E.: Quite by chance I have discovered that MapInfo can do a multi-page pdf, if you have a layout which stretches across more sheets than one. We use the A size series (not sure what the equivalent would be in US terms) where for instance A2 equals 4xA4 (2 by2). If I make a layout A2 big and sets the page size to A4, MapInfo will split it into four parts and print it as a four page pdf file. So one option in your case would be to put the layout contents one by one in such a grid. But this is not feasible if you change the content of the same mapper window for each consecutive layout to be printed. I have not found a way to output several layouts into the same pdf-file but must resort to manually combining them in Acrobat afterwards. --- Martin Spiers: PDFEdit, part of the pdf995 suite includes a function to combine each print document to the most recent document. This may do what you want, though I've had some difficulty getting it to work correctly with some applications. --- Steve Zuckerman: I do a lot of batch map (in MB) processing to output as pdf. While you can create multipage pdfs by using your page setup effectively, I don't know of any way to send through MB multiple maps to the same pdf ( appending) without overwriting the initial pdf. A couple of thoughts however do come to mind, 1) If the batch run has maps of the same size, frame all the layouts into the same layout window thus each map is a "page" ( a pain dealing with margin info but....) 2) There is the utility within the Acrobat tools where you can add a pdf into an existing pdf - thus creating a multipage pdf. Not batch but pretty simple. --- Warren Vick: While playing around with batch prints to PDF last year, several listers recommended PDF995 (www.pdf995.com). It's a bit of a fiddle to install as you need other components to get it working fully, but worth the effort... and free, which is nice. There's an option to batch to the same file. Apparently you can also save to sequentially numbered files but I never got that working correctly and ended up using a free "Split document" plug-in for Acrobat. --- Michael D. Hankins: If you can create single PDF's using mapbasic, then you can create on big PDF file containing all the individual PDFs using Adobe Acrobat. Acrobat has the ability to combine all open PDF documents into one. This is listed in 7.0 Help section on converting multiple documents to PDF. --- Phil Waight: Adobe Distiller is the tool for the job (acrodist.exe) and postscript printer driver. 1.. In your MapBasic appliation, you printwin each page as a postscript file, and build a list of names for processing. This +is trickiest step, as you need to wait til the print file's available and rename it from the standard postscript output +location. There are various steps, but once "fileexists" succeeds, I loop on a "open, pos to EOF, read location, close" and +wait for the EOF location to remain unchanged. (There may be a system call which does this more succinctly) 2.. Create a Distiller job file with commands for thumbnails and listing the page file references. You can create +hierarchical, nested bookmarks if you have subset geography to process. 3.. Run Distiller from MapBasic using ExecuteandWait 4.. Clean up all the .ps files. The whole thing is non-trivial. There are a number of timing issues and the masses of temp tables no doubt created need to be +closed and deleted along the way, but once running works consistently. --- Peter Jolly: Have a look at the "PDF Toolkit" (http://www.accesspdf.com/pdftk/) which is free (I think?), uses a command-line interface, and does all sorts of tricks with PDF files. --- Robert Crossley: One trick I use is to use distiller and rename the layout window, and this gives a different unique name to each output file. This will solve the renaming issue mentioned, but will not solve your issue with multiple pages. I think that if you print on multipage layout, you will get a multipage pdf, so perhaps you could generate this instead., viz move your origin one page over for each new map? printer margin settings can stuff you around for this though. _______________________________________________ MapInfo-L mailing list MapInfo-L@lists.directionsmag.com http://www.directionsmag.com/mailman/listinfo/mapinfo-l
