iText: experimental version solves my problem

[Kyler Laird]

I've mentioned that I've been happily using iText recently (after trying
several other tools) for concatenating PDF files. (It does a bunch of
other things too, but I haven't gotten to them.) Last week we ran into
a problem with it barfing on several files. This is especially
problematic because although it spits out some exception lines, the
return code is still zero and the result file is still created if there
are other files that it can parse.

The file I used for my tests was generated by Acrobat PDFMaker 5.0 for
Word. It yielded a bookmark-related exception.
$ java -cp /usr/share/java/itext.jar com.lowagie.tools.concat_pdf /tmp/research.pdf /dev/null
java.lang.ClassCastException
at com.lowagie.text.pdf.SimpleBookmark.bookmarkDepth(Unknown Source)
at com.lowagie.text.pdf.SimpleBookmark.getBookmark(Unknown Source)
at com.lowagie.tools.concat_pdf.main(Unknown Source)

By switching to version 130 of Paulo's experimental version of iText
http://itextpdf.sourceforge.net/
I was able to handle this file without any problems. The .jar file was
a drop-in replacement.

I'm happy again.

--kyler