[pdf] How to merge many PDF files into a single one?

I have 16 pdfs that I want to convert into a single one... I am on Ubuntu 10.10, how can I do it?

Also seem pdfjam: http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/sci/statistics/staff/academic/firth/software/pdfjam/

First, get Pdftk:

sudo apt-get install pdftk

Now, as shown on example page, use

pdftk 1.pdf 2.pdf 3.pdf cat output 123.pdf

for merging pdf files into one.

There are lots of free tools that can do this.

I use PDFTK (a open source cross-platform command-line tool) for things like that.

You can also use Ghostscript to merge different PDFs. You can even use it to merge a mix of PDFs, PostScript (PS) and EPS into one single output PDF file:

gs \
  -o merged.pdf \
  -sDEVICE=pdfwrite \
  -dPDFSETTINGS=/prepress \
   input_1.pdf \
   input_2.pdf \
   input_3.eps \
   input_4.ps \
   input_5.pdf

However, I agree with other answers: for your use case of merging PDF file types only, pdftk may be the best (and certainly fastest) option.

Update:
If processing time is not the main concern, but if the main concern is file size (or a fine-grained control over certain features of the output file), then the Ghostscript way certainly offers more power to you. To highlight a few of the differences:

• Ghostscript can 'consolidate' the fonts of the input files which leads to a smaller file size of the output. It also can re-sample images, or scale all pages to a different size, or achieve a controlled color conversion from RGB to CMYK (or vice versa) should you need this (but that will require more CLI options than outlined in above command).
• pdftk will just concatenate each file, and will not convert any colors. If each of your 16 input PDFs contains 5 subsetted fonts, the resulting output will contain 80 subsetted fonts. The resulting PDF's size is (nearly exactly) the sum of the input file bytes.