A minimal GUI to merge PDF files together into a single PDF file.
Part of my work in my day job requires me to print paperwork for our customers, sometimes for one customer this could be up to 80 papers. We have more than 1 customer. The program that we use to get this paper work takes an between 8-12 seconds to start printing, during which the program is in a state of limbo until it's done. If we assume the average is 10 seconds, then thats 800 seconds. That's 13.3 minutes of waiting.
I had started saving the files instead of immediately printing them. This only took 200-500 milliseconds to do. Then, using Adobe Acrobat Reader, I was able to print 15 pdf files at a time. Though this increased efficiency, it still took too long to do as it would start, stop repeat for each job and required me to print the next set after the first 15 were done. This was a good process but still not efficient enough.
After getting a new PC at work, I learned from the IT department that my employers were no longer going to use Adobe Acrobat Reader. So I had to say goodbye to Acrobat and revert to the slower process unless, I want to pay a subscription for Acrobat. I don't.
So, I developed a simple Electron application that would allow me to select multiple pdf files with no limit and then combine those files into a single PDF file of which I could then print all files with a click of a single button. To me, thats glorious.
This application makes use of PDF Merger JS who's only dependency is PDF JS
This project is still in development stages, and I have only tested simple PDFs. There is an issue when trying to print PDF files that have headers. As far as footers, I have not tested that yet.
You're going to need to make sure you have installed NodeJS. This comes prepackaged with NPM which you can check your version using these commands:
node -v
and
npm -v
First clone the repository.
git clone https://github.com/itsDevKay/PDFMerger-Electron-GUI.git
cd into the directory with: cd PDFMerger-Electron-GUI
Install the node modules using npm.
npm install
Once that is complete, you can run the application using npm start.
However, if you want to build it into a desktop application you'll need to first install Electron Builder.
yarn add electron-builder --dev
You can also use: npm install electron-builder --dev although, the documentation recommends you use Yarn.
Once that is complete, you can build for your OS using one of the commands below:
electron-builder build --mac
electron-builder build --win --ia32
electron-builder build --linux