Merge PDF Files

Winston was asking me if I 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 programs 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 need to 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 multiple 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. Here is a quick overview of the most important features:

• Split and merge pdf documents
• Update PDF Metadata
• Fill PDF forms
• Encrypt or decrypt documents
• Rotate pdf pages
• Unpack pdf attachments
• Repair corrupted pdf

Instructions for all commands are available on the official program website.

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