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 had to recently research this and came up with the following. In the end I went with ImageMagick.

1. Merging is hard! http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/software/pdf-append.php
2. pdfjoin from the pdfjam package seems to be the standard on unix-like systems but not available on Windows
3. Coherentpdf is multi-platform. However licences cost up to €700
4. pdftk is multi-platform and open source. However it does appear to be 3 years old.
5. Imagemagick will merge pdfs and also generate pdfs from jpgs. I know it works on Linux and Windows.
6. PDFsam works using iText and Java

Answer 2

I've mentioned it in the other topics and I'll mention it again: you can use the Ghostscript utilities pdf2ps and ps2pdf do it as so:

pdf2ps file1.pdf file1.ps  # Convert file1 to PostScript
pdf2ps file2.pdf file2.ps  # Convert file2 to PostScript
cat file2.ps >> file1.ps   # Concatenate files
ps2pdf file1.ps output.pdf # Convert back to PDF