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> Research > Projects > CGFTools

Electronic Publishing
The Essential Last (Prepress) Step

René Berndt, Dipl.-Inform. Marco Zens
>{r.berndt, m.zens}@tu-bs.deComputer Graphics, Braunschweig University of Technology, Germany, http://graphics.tu-bs.de

Introduction

Beginning with the availability of new publication techniques (like printing-on-demand) and everyday usage of digital documents (e.g. in PDF ) it is now possible to create professional looking publications on your own, i.e. without the help of a publishing house. This has advantages both in production time as well as in production cost and often is the only feasible solution for a non-profit organization (e.g. a conference/ workshop organizer). Several problems have to be solved, though:

• individual papers (i.e. PDF documents) have to be assembled into one book or proceedings or journal volume (i.e. one complete new document)
• a consistent page-numbering has to be added
• pages of different sizes or content offsets have to be aligned to a uniform raster
• copyright information needs to be added

For PDF-documents (which we solely consider here) this can all be achieved by manual interaction using the commercial package. Depending on the size of the planned publication, this can be a very tedious and error-prone work. Therefore it is essential to have a set of tools that automatize these tasks, as much as possible.

The "CGF ToolKit"

CGFpaginate

The toolkit described here (named CGF ToolKit, as it was first used for the Eurographics journal Computer Graphics forum) is a set of currently five plugins/ programs for Adobe Acrobat. These are:
CGFpagesizer: to set all pages of a PDF document to a specified size
CGFnormalize: to adjust the upper left edge of the page content to a given offset
CGFpaginate: to add consecutive page numbers to all pages of a document
CGFbranding: to insert a “brandmark” on the first page of a set of PDF files
CGFmerge: to combine several PDF-documents into one new document

Technical Details

All but CGFmerge are implemented as plugins using the SDK for Adobe Acrobat 5. CGF merge is a Visual Basic application accessing the functionality of Acrobat via Adobe’s Interapplication Communication(IAC). Shortly, they work as follows:
CGFpagesizer: Simply sets the and the of each page to the given values.
CGFnormalize:Calculates for each page the bounding box of the content, computes its distance to the given offset and moves every content element by this value.
CGFpaginate: For each page the horizontal position (odd and even pages) of the added page number is given by the user, while the vertical position is retrieved from the bounding box of the page.
CGFmerge: If one of the documents to be merged has an odd number of pages, an empty page will be added after the last page, so that each individual contribution starts on an odd page. Additionally the first page of each original document can be extracted (e.g. to serve as an abstract).
CGFbranding: Simply adds a logo (which can also contain hyperlinks) to the first page at an arbitrary position. Additionally changes to the document security can be applied.
In a typical workflow, the tools would be run in this order.

CGFbranding

Results

The CGFToolKit is currently being used successfully for the production of the Eurographics 2002 proceedings of the conference. 43 papers of approx. 10 pages each have to be normalized and paginated. They will be combined to one new PDF document, which will then be forwarded directly to the printer.