: Creating booklet "templates" for users with no design experience Currently, we design print booklets in Adobe InDesign. We create hundreds of these booklets a year, the design and layout is mostly

@Yeniel278

An alternative to acrobat would be: Make a web application that concatenates the pages for you. There are several benefit of this approach.


The template pages are centrally managed. This means that less work is spent on managing and keeping the templates up to date.
Acrobat is easyish to use but not exactly user friendly in all possible scenarios.
It can be tailored to your workflow.


Merging PDF pages is a pretty trivial thing. I mean you could do it in notepad though is wouldn't like to calculate the offsets in the prolog. Programatically merging in your backend can be done with


Node.JS


pdf merge

Python


pypdf2

C#


PDFSharp

...


So merging is actually inbuilt into any language you might deem usable for your backend now all it needs is just pages and a gui for what to merge.

Because i do not want to leave you empty handed let us make a python script that:


Lists all pdf files in same folder as the script
Merges any highlighted pdf files into one once you press merge
Demonstrates how easy this stuff really is


And here is the code:

#!/usr/bin/python
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-

from Tkinter import *
from glob import glob
from PyPDF2 import PdfFileMerger, PdfFileReader

def merge():
sel = listbox.curselection()
merger = PdfFileMerger()
for item in sel:
fn = listbox.get(item)
merger.append(PdfFileReader(file(fn, 'rb')))

merger.write("last-merged.pdf")


master = Tk()

listbox = Listbox(master, selectmode=EXTENDED)
listbox.pack()
button = Button(master, command=merge, text="Merge")
button.pack()


for item in glob("*.pdf"):
listbox.insert(END, item)

mainloop()

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@Nimeshi706

If you save out all of the individual product pages / sections as PDFs then individual users could use Adobe Acrobat to combine them in whatever permutation they need. You could include a default front cover, intro, contacts page, etc to keep things nice and consistent and corporate.

If the PDFs were saved in a central repository then it would be straight forward to add new products or update existing files and know that everyone was using the same, correct, current documents.

Acrobat is relatively inexpensive (if your staff don't already have it) and it has a nice gentle learning curve. You could even include a tutorial PDF explaining how to build a booklet in the same folder as all the other content.

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