Merge convert multiple PDF files into one PDF

Question

How could I merge   convert multiple PDF files into one large PDF file   I tried the following  but the content of the target file was not as expected   convert file1 pdf file2 pdf merged pdf   I need a very simple basic command line  CLI  solution  Best would be if I could pipe the output of the merge   convert straight into pdf2ps   as originally attempted in my previously asked question here  Linux piping   convert - gt  pdf2ps - gt  lp

User · Answer

Use PDF tools from python https   pypi python org pypi pdftools 1 0 6  Download the tar gz file and uncompress it and run the command like below  python pdftools-1 1 0 pdfmerge py -o output pdf -d file1 pdf file2 pdf file3    You should install pyhton3 before you run the above command  This tools support the below   add insert Remove Rotate Split Merge Zip   You can find more details in the below link and it is open source  https   github com MrLeeh pdftools

User · Answer

Apache PDFBox http   pdfbox apache org   PDFMerger This application will take a list of pdf documents and merge them  saving the result in a new document      usage  java -jar pdfbox-app-x y z jar PDFMerger  Source PDF files  2   n    Target PDF file

User · Answer

I m sorry  I managed to find the answer myself using google and a bit of luck      For those interested   I installed the pdftk  pdf toolkit  on our debian server  and using the following command I achieved desired output   pdftk file1 pdf file2 pdf cat output output pdf   OR   gs -q -sPAPERSIZE letter -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH -sDEVICE pdfwrite -sOutputFile output pdf file1 pdf file2 pdf file3 pdf       This in turn can be piped directly into pdf2ps

User · Answer

You can use the convert command directly   e g   convert sub1 pdf sub2 pdf sub3 pdf merged pdf

User · Answer

Considering that pdfunite is part of poppler it has a higher chance to be installed  usage is also simpler than pdftk   pdfunite in-1 pdf in-2 pdf in-n pdf out pdf

User · Answer

I like the idea of Chasmo  but I preffer to use the advantages of things like  convert   ls   pdf     merged pdf   Giving multiple source files to convert leads to merging them into a common pdf  This command merges all files with  pdfextension in the actual directory into merged pdf in the parent dir

User · Answer

pdfunite is fine to merge entire PDFs  If you want  for example  pages 2-7 from file1 pdf and pages 1 3 4 from file2 pdf  you have to use pdfseparate to split the files into separate PDFs for each page to give to pdfunite   At that point you probably want a program with more options  qpdf is the best utility I ve found for manipulating PDFs  pdftk is bigger and slower and Red Hat Fedora don t package it because of its dependency on gcj  Other PDF utilities have Mono or Python dependencies  I found qpdf produced a much smaller output file than using pdfseparate and pdfunite to assemble pages into a 30-page output PDF  970kB vs  1 6450 kB  Because it offers many more options  qpdf s command line is not as simple  the original request to merge file1 and file2 can be performed with  qpdf --empty --pages file1 pdf file2 pdf -- merged pdf

User · Answer

If you want to join all PDF files in a directory with Ghostscript  you can use find to do just that  Here s an example find   -name    pdf  -exec gs -o -sDEVICE pdfwrite -dPDFSETTINGS  prepress -sOutputFile    out pdf       Will find all pdf in current directory  and create out pdf in parent directory  Might be useful if they re looking for a quick way for do an entire directory with ghostscript

User · Answer

You can use sejda-console  free and open source  Unzip it and run  sejda-console merge -f file1 pdf file2 pdf -o merged pdf  It preserves bookmarks  link annotations  acroforms etc   it actually has quite a lot of options you can play with  just run sejda-console merge -h to see them all

User · Answer

Try the good ghostscript  gs -dBATCH -dNOPAUSE -q -sDEVICE pdfwrite -sOutputFile merged pdf mine1 pdf mine2 pdf  or even this way for an improved version for low resolution PDFs  thanks to Adriano for pointing this out   gs -dBATCH -dNOPAUSE -q -sDEVICE pdfwrite -dPDFSETTINGS  prepress -sOutputFile merged pdf mine1 pdf mine2 pdf  In both cases the ouput resolution is much higher and better than this way using convert  convert -density 300x300 -quality 100 mine1 pdf mine2 pdf merged pdf  In this way you wouldn t need to install anything else  just work with what you already have installed in your system  at least both come by default in my box   Hope this helps  UPDATE  first of all thanks for all your nice comments   just a tip that may work for you guys  after googleing  I found a superb trick to shrink the size of PDFs  I reduced with it one PDF of 300 MB to just 15 MB with an acceptable resolution  and all of this with the good ghostscript  here it is  gs -sDEVICE pdfwrite -dCompatibilityLevel 1 4 -dPDFSETTINGS  default -dNOPAUSE -dQUIET -dBATCH -dDetectDuplicateImages -dCompressFonts true -r150 -sOutputFile output pdf input pdf  cheers

User · Answer

Although it s not a command line solution  it may help macos users    Select your PDF files Right-click on your highlighted files Select Quick actions   Create PDF

User · Answer

I am biased being one of the developers of PyMuPDF  a Python binding of MuPDF    You can easily do what you want with it  and much more   Skeleton code works like this    ------------------------------------------------- import fitz           the binding PyMuPDF fout   fitz open      new PDF for joined output flist     1 pdf    2 pdf           list of filenames to be joined  for f in flist      fin   fitz open f     open an input file     fout insertPDF fin    append f     fin close    fout save  joined pdf    -------------------------------------------------   That s about it  Several options are available for selecting only pages ranges  maintaining a joint table of contents  reversing page sequence or changing page rotation  etc   etc   We are on PyPi

User · Answer

bash-script  which checks for merging errors I had the problem  that a few pdf-merges produced some error messages  As it is quite a lot trial and error to find the corrupt pdfs  I wrote a script for it  The following bash-script  merges all available pdfs in a folder one by one and gives a success status after each merge  Just copy it in the folder with the pdfs and execute from there         bin bash          PDFOUT  all merged pdf     rm -f   PDFOUT           for f in   ls   pdf      do       printf  quot processing  -50s quot   quot  f      quot        if   -f  quot  PDFOUT quot     then           https   stackoverflow com questions 8158584 ghostscript-to-merge-pdfs-compresses-the-result            -dPDFSETTINGS  prepress         status  gs -dBATCH -dNOPAUSE -q -sDEVICE pdfwrite -sOutputFile  quot   PDFOUT  new quot    PDFOUT   quot  f quot  2 gt   dev null          nChars  echo -n  quot   status  quot    wc -c          if    nChars -gt 0           then           echo  quot gs ERROR quot          else           echo  quot successfully quot          fi         mv  quot   PDFOUT  new quot    PDFOUT        else         cp  quot  f quot    PDFOUT          echo  quot successfully quot        fi     done  example output  processing inp1 pdf                                          successfully processing inp2 pdf                                          successfully

User · Answer

If you want to convert all the downloaded images into one pdf then execute  convert img 0  19  jpg slides pdf

User · Answer

Yet another option  useful is you want to select also the pages inside the documents to be merged  pdfjoin image jpg  -  doc only first pages pdf  1 2  doc with all pages pdf  -   It comes with package texlive-extra-utils

User · Answer

This is the easiest solution if you have multiple files and do not want to type in the names one by one  qpdf --empty --pages   pdf -- out pdf

User · Answer

You can see use the free and open source pdftools  disclaimer  I am the author of it    It is basically a Python interface to the Latex pdfpages package   To merge pdf files one by one  you can run   pdftools --input-file file1 pdf --input-file file2 pdf --output output pdf   To merge together all the pdf files in a directory  you can run   pdftools --input-dir   dir with pdfs --output output pdf

User · Answer

Also pdfjoin a pdf b pdf will create a new b-joined pdf with the contents of a pdf and b pdf

User · Answer

Here s a method I use which works and is easy to implement   This will require both the fpdf and fpdi libraries which can be downloaded here    FPDF  http   www fpdf org en download php FPDI  https   www setasign com products fpdi downloads   require  fpdf php    require  fpdi php      files     doc1 pdf    doc2 pdf    doc3 pdf      pdf   new FPDI     foreach   files as  file         pdf- gt setSourceFile  file        tpl    pdf- gt importPage 1    MediaBox         pdf- gt addPage         pdf- gt useTemplate  tpl       pdf- gt Output  F   merged pdf

User · Answer

I second the pdfunite recommendation  I was however getting Argument list too long errors as I was attempting to merge   2k PDF files   I turned to Python for this and two external packages  PyPDF2  to handle all things PDF related  and natsort  to do a  natural  sort of the directory s file names   In case this can help someone   from PyPDF2 import PdfFileMerger import natsort import os  DIR    dir-with-pdfs   OUTPUT    output pdf   file list   filter lambda f  f endswith   pdf    os listdir DIR   file list   natsort natsorted file list      strict  used because of   https   github com mstamy2 PyPDF2 issues 244 issuecomment-206952235 merger   PdfFileMerger strict False   for f name in file list    f   open os path join DIR  f name    rb     merger append f   output   open OUTPUT   wb   merger write output

[linux] Merge / convert multiple PDF files into one PDF

Examples related to linux

Examples related to pdf

Examples related to merge

Examples related to command-line-interface