Hassle Free PDF Merging

[electronmage]

Took me a bit of digging, but found just what I needed. I have been writing Tang Soo Do Martial Arts manuals for some time. I did the first three (Gup, Cho Dan, and E Dan on my Windows machine). Bought a Pi, now I do everything on my Pi. It is fast enough to do everything I need to do, but slow enough to keep me off the web (such a time suck).

Anyways, I found pdftk. It's an older program, but works just fine

To install:

sudo apt-get install pdftk

To merge pdf files, go to file folder with pdfs you want to merge:

pdftk *.pdf cat output nameoffile.pdf

That's it. Hope this helps.

[Joe Schmoe]

What does it mean to "merge" a PDF file?

Does this mean that if I have two files, that contain:

First file:
1
10
100

Second file:

5
15
50

I will end up with:
1
5
10
15
50
100

'Cause that's what I expect from a "merge" ?

[gkreidl]

@Joe Schmoe:

This is complete nonsense regarding PDF files and I'm sure you know that. But you seem to like playing with words.

BTW, there is pdfSAM (pdf split and merge), which even uses the term "merge" in its name.

[Nr90]

To merge: To combine or unite

You can combine in any arbitrary fashion, but Joe Schmoe's method is obviously strange.
The OP's method produces what most people would expect it to.

[Joe Schmoe]

I have no idea what the OP's method is. It was certainly never stated in this thread.

That's why I asked the question above.

[electronmage]

Merging pdf files, which if you have the full version of Adobe, is easy. However, this command line program takes individual pdf files with distinct names and cats them together. So, for instance, if you had the following files;

Introduction.pdf
SamDanTraining.pdf
GeomDefenseTechniques.pdf

and you wanted to combine them into a single pdf for upload to create a book, you could merge them together using the command line entry that was given in the bit at the beginning of this thread.

Happy merging.

[aTao]

Properly merging PDFs is wee bit more than cat.
There are embedded fonts to consider with possible removal of duplicates. There are also font tables that will almost certainly need to be modified since font1 in document 1 will not necessarily be font1 in document 2.

Should anyone wish to consider merging 2 documents of a publishing nature with any other method than appending one to the other then they should probably stick to dealing cards instead of anything to do with documents.

[electronmage]

I guess I'll try to avoid the snidery that I have obviously generated with my posts of an extremely non-complex nature. It was my hope that the post would allow people who were having difficulty combining pdfs into one document an easy way of doing so.

While it is true that if you are going to publish something, you should take care that all fonts are similar throughout the documents to be combined (as anyone with any interest in publishing would no doubt do without even a thought), you may just want to combine documents.

You can easily combine them using the command line entry given in the first post of this thread.

You don't even need to dwell on the semantics of what merging means (as anyone who wants to mash pdf files together and has DDG'd solutions to this problem knows with the first url return in the search). Nor do you need to worry about the rigors that the "cat" command entails.

If you have multiple pdf files that you want in a single pdf file, this is your ticket.

Finally, I was hoping that the quality of people's comments would surpass the common trite and dim witted repartee that is seen in online gaming (i.e. League of Legends).