Comments on: Join PDF files

By: Kelle

Kelle — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 21:28:53 +0000

Regarding Preview in 10.6 and Marshall’s comment: I was having some trouble combining PDFs with this method and it turns out that you have to drag the new PDF on top of the thumbnail, not just to the sidebar. If you just add it to the sidebar, Preview think you want to display multiple PDFs in one window. More details here http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20090915223224601

By: Henry

Henry — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 20:31:45 +0000

Awwww, man, I *had* to learn this the day after I needed. Oh well, lesson learned … thanks, everyone, for the tips.

By: Lisa

Lisa — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 16:51:22 +0000

Another option is to use Automator.

1) Finder: Get Selected Finder Items.
2) PDF: Combine PDF Pages
3) Finder: Open Finder Items

By: Charon

Charon — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 21:44:39 +0000

You can also use pdfpages, e.g.:

\documentclass[letter]{article}
\usepackage{pdfpages}
\begin{document}
\includepdf[pages=1-]{/path/file1.pdf}
\includepdf[pages=1-]{/path/file2.pdf}
\includepdf[pages=1-]{/path/file3.pdf}
\end{document}

Links in the files are lost when you do this, though.

By: Kayhan

Kayhan — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 14:39:54 +0000

I have been using gs for this as well, but I’ve found that my pdfbookmarks don’t work correctly afterwards. Has anyone else had this problem and/or fixed it?

By: Jonathan Foster

Jonathan Foster — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 18:17:50 +0000

Naturally your friend Convert can do this too: convert piece1.pdf piece2.pdf Output.pdf Another nice GUI option to manipulate/join multiple PDFs is the freeware program PDFLab

By: Marshall

Marshall — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 02:19:52 +0000

I’ve used the command line options before, but now in Snow Leopard you can do this right in Preview. Just open up both PDF files and show the sidebar with the tiny thumbnail images of the pages, drag one set of thumbnails into the other PDF, and hit ’save’. You can also delete pages from a PDF by deleting thumbnails, or copy some pages and create a new PDF from them. These improvements in Preview are one of my favorite things about Snow Leopard.

By: Wolfgang Kerzendorf

Wolfgang Kerzendorf — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 00:55:22 +0000

There’s a fatastic tool called pdfmerge4unix (pdfmerge for short) which is a little perl program that does that for you. It works without problems on Snow Leopard and Leopard.
The other thing that I discovered: matplotlib can do multi-page pdf files
from matplotlib.backends.backend_pdf import PdfPages
pdf=PdfPages(‘mypdffile.pdf’)
savefig(pdf,format=’pdf’)
#when done:
pdf.close()

These programs were very helpful, at least for me.