Getting fast PDF page count (without opening file)?

Question

I’ve got a menu with about 100 PDFs and for various
reasons I’d like to display the page count for each. I could
enter the page count by hand but that becomes a maintenance
nightmare as the PDFs are updated and someone (myself included)
will forget to update the count. Opening each PDF in an xtra to get
the page count would be too slow for 100 documents . I’ve
found a dll that claims to parse the PDF header and quickly count
PDF pages which might work (we’re already using dllBinder for
MAPI access) although I haven’t started experimenting with
it. Has anyone tried something similar? Can I parse the header with
lingo/Buddy API and avoid working with the dll black box?

Answer 1

I would take an approach in between the extremes you listed.
Consider
this. Make a list of all the documents, and make an automated
process
using Impressario or something to get the total pages in all
100
documents. Save this list. It will take a bit to open and
close all
the docs, but it only need to be done once. From then on,
compare to
the saved list. Whenever a doc gets changed use your
automated
Impressario process to update the list.
If the DLL route doesn't pan out, then that is how I would go
about it.
You;d still need to remember to update your list after every
change,
but at least it is an automatic process.