PDF >

ImageMagick ∞

(convert is from ImageMagick)

• Tested 2019-11-20 – 8:6.9.7.4+dfsg-11+deb9u7 on Debian 9.9.0-i386-xfce-CD-1

\sudo  \apt-get  install  imagemagick
\convert  -verbose  *.pdf  target.pdf

poppler-utils (pdfunite) ∞

\sudo  \apt-get  install  poppler-utils
\pdfunite  file1.pdf  file2.pdf  out.pdf

# Or use shell pattern matching, like:
# \pdfunite  *  out.pdf

pdftk ∞

https://www.pdflabs.com/tools/pdftk-the-pdf-toolkit/ ^[ 1 ] was http://www.pdfhacks.com/pdftk/

\sudo  \apt-get  install  pdftk
# verbose generates an error for some reason
# \pdftk  *  out.pdf  verbose
# does nothing
\pdftk  *  out.pdf

texexec ∞

I used the following command with texexec and it worked perfect except it changed to legal size paper instead of letter. But I was able to use Preview to crop it back to normal anyways.

\texexec  --pdfarrange  --paper=landscape  --result  trans.pdf  Transcript003.pdf  Transcript004.pdf

Multivalent ∞

multivalent.sourceforge.net

Multivalent worked fine for me using Java 1.4:

java  -classpath /path/to/Multivalent.jar  tool.pdf.Merge  *

If you don’t want to add that option every time, just do

setenv CLASSPATH $CLASSPATH:/path/to/Multivalent.jar
# or
export CLASSPATH=$CLASSPATH:/path/to/Multivalent.jar

Ghostscript ∞

(Ghostscript)

\gs  -q  -sPAPERSIZE=letter  -dNOPAUSE  -dBATCH  -sDEVICE=pdfwrite  -sOutputFile=out.pdf  in1.pdf  in2.pdf in3.pdf ...

If the Ghostscript solution gives you seemingly randomly rotated pages, add -dAutoRotatePages=/None to the command line:

\gs  -dAutoRotatePages=/None  -q  -sPAPERSIZE=letter  -dNOPAUSE  -dBATCH  -sDEVICE=pdfwrite  -sOutputFile=out.pdf  in1.pdf  in2.pdf in3.pdf ...

Perl ∞

(Perl)

http://studio.imagemagick.org/pipermail/magick-users/2006-June/017692.html (not archived)

It’s instantaneous.

#!/usr/bin/perl
#
# Name:
#       pdf-combiner.pl.

use strict;
use warnings;

use PDF::Reuse;

# -------------

prFile('combo.pdf'); # Output.

for (qw/a b c d/) # Inputs.
{
        prImage("result_$_.pdf");
        prPage();
}

prEnd();

pdfpages ∞

(pdflatex)

The script is for landscape but could easily be changed for portrait.

#!/bin/bash
cat <<ENDTXT >__tmp__.tex
\documentclass[landscape]{article}
\usepackage{pdfpages}
\begin{document}
ENDTXT
outnm=$1
count=`echo "$# - 1" |bc`
for f in `seq $count`; do
shift
echo "\includepdf[pages=-]{$1}" >>__tmp__.tex
done
echo "\end{document}" >>__tmp__.tex
pdflatex __tmp__.tex
rm __tmp__.{tex,aux,log}
mv __tmp__.pdf $outnm

Usage:

scriptname.sh <outputfile.pdf> <inputfile1.pdf> <inputfile2.pdf> ... <inputfile100.pdf>

pdf2ps ∞

pdf2ps x.pdf
pdf2ps y.pdf
pdf2ps z.pdf
cat x.ps y.ps z.ps >big.ps
ps2pdf big.ps

If you convert the PDFs to Postscript and back, you may end up with a PDF that is less than optimal.

pdfjam ∞

https://github.com/rrthomas/pdfjam ^[ 2 ] was https://github.com/DavidFirth/pdfjam ^[ 3 ] see https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/sci/statistics/staff/academic-research/firth/software ^[ 4 ] was https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/sci/statistics/staff/academic-research/firth/software/pdfjam ^[ 5 ] was https://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/sci/statistics/staff/academic/firth/software/pdfjam/

PDFjam is a small collection of shell scripts which provide a simple interface to some of the functionality of the excellent pdfpages package (by Andreas Matthias) for pdfLaTeX. At present the utilities available are:

• pdfnup, which allows PDF files to be “n-upped” in roughly the way that psnup does for PostScript files.
• pdfjoin, which concatenates the pages of multiple PDF files together into a single file

• pdf90, which rotates the pages of one or more PDF files through 90 degrees (anti-clockwise).

In every case, source files are left unchanged.

A potential drawback of these utilities is that any hyperlinks in the source PDF are lost. On the positive side, there is no appreciable degradation of image quality in processing PDF files with thse programs, unlike some other indirect methods such as pdf2ps | psnup | ps2pdf (in the author’s experience). (Better than the rather indirect approach taken here would be filters that work directly on the PDF code, to produce output files with hyperlinks intact.)

Other/untested ∞

• PDF blender

• iText

  • iTextFront
• ConcatPDF
• fpdi1.1 (PHP)
• joinPDF (Java)