Including pages from a PDF

[simolus3]

I'm looking for a way to include pages from an existing PDF into a document created by sile, similar to \includepdf from the pdfpages latex package.
I'm aware that I can insert a PDF as an image, but I'm looking to insert (potentially multi-page) PDFs as into a document without modifications or any sile frames being typeset on those pages.

Currently I'm doing post-processing with pdfunite after I ran sile, but I'm wondering if there's a way to simplify this process by doing it all in one step. So, is there a way to do such thing in sile that I'm not seeing?

[alerque]

I don't think you've missed anything obvious, I don't think we have an easy mechanism for this. I haven't looked yet, but if the libtexpdf library has a mechanism for writing a page from a blob (basically a passthrough) it might not be too hard to implement this. It would require a fiddling with the outputter a little, but potentially not out of reach of a package with a few lines of lua. If the libtex library has this functionality but we haven't surfaced the API in our Lua wrapper (my best guess says this is going to be the case) then it would require a small change to the C code to surface the feature, then again as above a small Lua package to make it accessible to a document.

In my own production work I currently do something similar to you — except I use pdftk as my post-processing weapon of choice instead of pdfunite. It allows a bit more control over page ranges so I can splice together multiple pages in the middle of other documents or pages from one document to the front and back of another (e.g. for cover pages).

[alerque]

Doing a multi-page version would be about 5 lines of Lua (untested just off the cuff):

SILE.registerCommand("manypages", function (options, content)
   for i = options.start, options.end do
      SILE.call("img", { options.src, page = i })
   end
end

\manypages[src=myfile.pdf,start=2,end=6]

[davidchisnall]

Thanks. I used \background then \par\eject to get a title page. With resilient, I also needed \nofolios to prevent it from putting a page number on the title page (I'm using the resilient document class but not all of their extra complexity).

[Omikhleia]

You might also need to reset the page counter after your page break, if you do not want the title/cover page to be counted (e.g. \set-counter[id=folio,value=0). That, and the \nofolios, are not specific to resilient by the way, the same would apply with the core "book" class. (Not sure what the "extra complexity" is, but that's another topic.)

[davidchisnall]

You might also need to reset the page counter after your page break, if you do not want the title/cover page to be counted

I actually do want it to count, because I find it annoying when the PDF page number and the page numbers in the text are different. For the print flow, I won't include the cover since it gets added differently, which means the page numbers in the PDF and print editions won't quite line up, but the ePub and web versions don't have page numbers at all, so that's probably fine.

That, and the \nofolios, are not specific to resilient by the way, the same would apply with the core "book" class

Ah, that explains why I couldn't find them in the resilient docs. I was confused because there was a \noheaders command but no \nofooters command, but looking at the code for the resilient class I saw it used \nofolios in the start and tried that.

Not sure what the "extra complexity" is, but that's another topic

You have an opinionated build system that is probably very useful for people who want to target only resilient but is just inconvenient for a flow that targets multiple back ends, of which SILE is one. Being able to output a single XML file that I feed to SILE for it to consume and produce a PDF is great.

For reference, here is the output of the HTML flow, happy to share the SILE-generated PDF with anyone who is interested. It's now in quite a nice state, I will need to either add some float support (pointers to where in the code I should look welcome!) or manually move a load of floats after I get it back from the copyeditor. Aside from that the index is pretty terrible, but that's a content problem not a typesetting one.

[Omikhleia]

You have an opinionated build system that is probably very useful for people who want to target only resilient but is just inconvenient for a flow that targets multiple back ends, of which SILE is one.

I'd probably disagree (both in scope and purpose) but this is not the right place anyway ;)