[R] adding "Page X of XX" to PDFs

[@vi@e@gross m@iii@g oii gm@ii@com]

Having read all of the replies, it seems there are solutions for the
question and the OP points out that some solutions such as making the
document twice will affect the creation date.

I suspect the additional time to do so is seconds or at most minutes so it
may not be a big deal.

But what about the idea of creating a PDF with a placeholder like "Page N of
XXX" and after the file has been created, dates and all, perhaps edit it
programmatically and replace all instances of XXX with something of the same
length like " 23" as there seem to be tools like the pdftools package that
let you get the number of pages. I have no idea if some program, perhaps
external, can do that and retain the date you want.

-----Original Message-----
From: R-help <r-help-bounces using r-project.org> On Behalf Of Dennis Fisher
Sent: Friday, December 1, 2023 3:53 PM
To: r-help using r-project.org
Subject: [R] adding "Page X of XX" to PDFs

OS X
R 4.3.1

Colleagues

I often create multipage PDFs [pdf()] in which the text "Page X" appears in
the margin.  These PDFs are created automatically using a massive R script.

One of my clients requested that I change this to:
	Page X of XX 
where XX is the total number of pages.  

I don't know the number of expected pages so I can't think of any clever way
to do this.  I suppose that I could create the PDF, find out the number of
pages, then have a second pass in which the R script was fed the number of
pages.  However, there is one disadvantage to this -- the original PDF
contains a timestamp on each page -- the new version would have a different
timestamp -- so I would prefer to not use this approach.

Has anyone thought of some terribly clever way to solve this problem?

Dennis

Dennis Fisher MD
P < (The "P Less Than" Company)
Phone / Fax: 1-866-PLessThan (1-866-753-7784)
www.PLessThan.com

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