Winston was asking me if I would know a way to merge one or more pdf files so that the contents of all the files would appear in one pdf file at the end. A quick research revealed a software pdftk – pdf toolkit -which can be used to merge and split pdf files. Many shareware softwares exist that do the same thing but pdftk seems to be one of the few that can merge pdf files for free.
Pdftk runs from the command line which means you should unpack the software into a directory that you can access easily. I put the file into c: for testing purposes along with two pdfs called 123.pdf and 456.pdf.
If you run pdftk without parameters you get a quick output that details the most important parameters. Lets take a look at the possible operations:
Merge pdf files:
pdftk 123.pdf 456.pdf output 123456.pdf
This tells pdftk to merge the two pdf files 123.pdf and 456.pdf into a new pdf called 123456.pdf. If you want to merge more than two pdf files at once you simply add them between pdftk and output. You could also use wildcards to merge many or all pdfs with a certain name.
pdftk *.pdf output 123456.pdf
Split pages from one or more pdfs:
pdftk A=123.pdf B=456.pdf cat A1-2 B4-5 output 1245.pdf
Repair a pdf:
pdftk 123.pdf output 123fixed.pdf
Merge encrypted pdfs:
pdftk A=123.pdf 456.pdf input_pw A=password cat output 123456.pdf
Pdftk offers several more possibilities which are worth a look if you want to do something that I did not describe on this website. A version for Linux and Windows is available.
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Nice software…
there is another open source software with a nice gui based on Java and work great too, here’s the link http://www.pdfsam.org/
Very Nice, thx
That’s what i was looking for. Thx!
Already downloading for Linux.
this is a great tool, works very well
Nice… tool, I tried it on my PC, but I’m mostly a Mac user. Since then, I found an easier program:
Join PDF files
Since I don’t have to join a lot of PDF files, I just use the free version…
I needed to assemble 900 PDF chapters into a single 6000 page PDF book, complete with bookmarks to each chapter. I wrote a shell script to do it:
http://github.com/bronson/pdfdir