One of the great things about FileMaker is its ability to not only create a PDF from a single “print job”, but to take a series of separate jobs and concatenate them into a PDF via the “Save Records As PDF [append]” feature, like so:
(The above code comes from PDF Catalog with Table of Contents, which appeared on this site last year.) Basically, anything you can print from FileMaker, you can instead output as a PDF.
But what if you have existing multipage PDFs stored in container fields, and want to combine them into a larger PDF? This is something FileMaker cannot do natively. Recently I had a need to do just this, and happened to mention it to Jon Rosen at ErgoSoma, who suggested I take a look at a cross-platform utility called PDFtk Server.
Continue reading “Extending FileMaker’s PDF capabilities with PDFtk Server”