Is it possible to programmatically “chain” several PDF files, preferably from command line?

Question

Is there a way, in Linux, Windows, or preferably Mac OS X to take a bunch of PDF files and \"chain them\" into one \"booklet\" without owning Acrobat and preferably without

Answer 1

I have tried several different tools and have gotten the most reliable results with the PDF toolkit, pdftk. It seems to work more consistently than trying to use gs or messing around with conversion to PostScript and back. And it avoids dealing with one image per page, which is a nuisance.

pdftk is included in Debian-based Linux distributions and perhaps others as well.

Answer 2

ghostcript method:

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

from: How to concatenate PDFs without pain

ImageMagick method:

convert file1.pdf file2.pdf file3.pdf out.pdf

pdftk method:

pdftk file1.pdf file2.pdf file3.pdf cat output out.pdf

Answer 3

You can chain the "Get selected Items", "Combine PDF Pages", "Rename PDF Document" and "Move Finder Items" actions in Automator to create the desired workflow.

Answer 4

If you want something cross-platform I suggest this: http://pybrary.net/pyPdf/

Answer 5

I have also used Multivalent Java based tools. It is a simple invocation of Java MultiValent main program passing in each pdf file you want to append as arguments.

Answer 6

Have a look at Multivalent Document Tools

Failing that you can search out other tools via Freshmeat.net