Combine two (or more) PDF's

Question

Background: I need to provide a weekly report package for my sales staff. This package contains several (5-10) crystal reports.

Problem:

Answer 1

There's some good answers here already, but I thought I might mention that pdftk might be useful for this task. Instead of producing one PDF directly, you could produce each PDF you need and then combine them together as a post-process with pdftk. This could even be done from within your program using a system() or ShellExecute() call.

Answer 2

You could try pdf-shuffler gtk-apps.org

Answer 3

This is something that I figured out, and wanted to share with you.

Here you can join multiple Pdfs in one (following the input list order)

    public static byte[] MergePdf(List<byte[]> pdfs)
    {
        List<PdfSharp.Pdf.PdfDocument> lstDocuments = new List<PdfSharp.Pdf.PdfDocument>();
        foreach (var pdf in pdfs)
        {
            lstDocuments.Add(PdfReader.Open(new MemoryStream(pdf), PdfDocumentOpenMode.Import));
        }

        using (PdfSharp.Pdf.PdfDocument outPdf = new PdfSharp.Pdf.PdfDocument())
        { 
            for(int i = 1; i<= lstDocuments.Count; i++)
            {
                foreach(PdfSharp.Pdf.PdfPage page in lstDocuments[i-1].Pages)
                {
                    outPdf.AddPage(page);
                }
            }

            MemoryStream stream = new MemoryStream();
            outPdf.Save(stream, false);
            byte[] bytes = stream.ToArray();

            return bytes;
        }           
    }

Answer 4

Following method gets a List of byte array which is PDF byte array and then returns a byte array.

using ...;
using PdfSharp.Pdf;
using PdfSharp.Pdf.IO;

public static class PdfHelper
{
    public static byte[] PdfConcat(List<byte[]> lstPdfBytes)
    {
        byte[] res;

        using (var outPdf = new PdfDocument())
        {
            foreach (var pdf in lstPdfBytes)
            {
                using (var pdfStream = new MemoryStream(pdf))
                using (var pdfDoc = PdfReader.Open(pdfStream, PdfDocumentOpenMode.Import))
                    for (var i = 0; i < pdfDoc.PageCount; i++)
                        outPdf.AddPage(pdfDoc.Pages[i]);
            }

            using (var memoryStreamOut = new MemoryStream())
            {
                outPdf.Save(memoryStreamOut, false);

                res = Stream2Bytes(memoryStreamOut);
            }
        }

        return res;
    }

    public static void DownloadAsPdfFile(string fileName, byte[] content)
    {
        var ms = new MemoryStream(content);

        HttpContext.Current.Response.Clear();
        HttpContext.Current.Response.ContentType = "application/pdf";
        HttpContext.Current.Response.AddHeader("content-disposition", $"attachment;filename={fileName}.pdf");
        HttpContext.Current.Response.Buffer = true;
        ms.WriteTo(HttpContext.Current.Response.OutputStream);
        HttpContext.Current.Response.End();
    }

    private static byte[] Stream2Bytes(Stream input)
    {
        var buffer = new byte[input.Length];
        using (var ms = new MemoryStream())
        {
            int read;
            while ((read = input.Read(buffer, 0, buffer.Length)) > 0)
                ms.Write(buffer, 0, read);

            return ms.ToArray();
        }
    }
}

So, the result of PdfHelper.PdfConcat method is passed to PdfHelper.DownloadAsPdfFile method.

PS: A NuGet package named [PdfSharp][1] need to be installed. So in the Package Manage Console window type:

Install-Package PdfSharp

Answer 5

I used iTextsharp with c# to combine pdf files. This is the code I used.

string[] lstFiles=new string[3];
    lstFiles[0]=@"C:/pdf/1.pdf";
    lstFiles[1]=@"C:/pdf/2.pdf";
    lstFiles[2]=@"C:/pdf/3.pdf";

    PdfReader reader = null;
    Document sourceDocument = null;
    PdfCopy pdfCopyProvider = null;
    PdfImportedPage importedPage;
    string outputPdfPath=@"C:/pdf/new.pdf";


    sourceDocument = new Document();
    pdfCopyProvider = new PdfCopy(sourceDocument, new System.IO.FileStream(outputPdfPath, System.IO.FileMode.Create));

    //Open the output file
    sourceDocument.Open();

    try
    {
        //Loop through the files list
        for (int f = 0; f < lstFiles.Length-1; f++)
        {
            int pages =get_pageCcount(lstFiles[f]);

            reader = new PdfReader(lstFiles[f]);
            //Add pages of current file
            for (int i = 1; i <= pages; i++)
            {
                importedPage = pdfCopyProvider.GetImportedPage(reader, i);
                pdfCopyProvider.AddPage(importedPage);
            }

            reader.Close();
         }
        //At the end save the output file
        sourceDocument.Close();
    }
    catch (Exception ex)
    {
        throw ex;
    }


private int get_pageCcount(string file)
{
    using (StreamReader sr = new StreamReader(File.OpenRead(file)))
    {
        Regex regex = new Regex(@"/Type\s*/Page[^s]");
        MatchCollection matches = regex.Matches(sr.ReadToEnd());

        return matches.Count;
    }
}

Answer 6

PDFsharp seems to allow merging multiple PDF documents into one.

And the same is also possible with ITextSharp.