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I am looking to stitch together multiple PDF's together into one file. Is there a program/way (open source prefered) that can do this for me with little hassle? If you share a program please give reasons why it will work and not just a link.

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3 Answers

up vote 7 down vote accepted

I quite like PDFSam as it's a nice cross-platform tool for splitting and merging pages from pdf files.

I believe it is written in Java (hence cross platform) and the source code is available.

I've used it as my fallback many times when people have scanned me a bunch of documents off the network printer that I've then had to split off and remerge in different orders and I'd have to say it has rather a lot of useful features for a tool whose only real purpose is to split and merge pdfs.

It even supports in-place reordering and thumbnail views which can save a bit of time, especially when you can't remember which file is which.

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Installing PDFSam installs PDFSoda which I didn't want, didn't download and have no idea what it is. –  badbod99 Jan 7 at 10:10
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pdftk seems to be the most-often referenced tool for all sorts of PDF manipulation.

The sample command from their website describing how to merge multiple PDFs.


A rudimentary GUI is available: pdftk4all

A slightly better looking one: pdftk Builder

Finally, PDFCreator can merge documents as well, but it seems to be a bit cumbersome to do. It'd be really handy for merging several different types of source files though.

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You can use gsview

Install GSview to the computer. Convert file1.pdf and file2.pdf into PostScript (.ps) format. In Adobe Acrobat Reader this can be done with File -> Open.. file1.pdf, File -> Print... -> Select some PostScript printer -> mark Print to file -> OK. Write file1.ps to File name: -> OK.

Repeat these steps to convert file2.pdf into file2.ps. In this example it is assumed that the files are saved into c:\tilap\ directory.

It's not necessary to have a PostScript printer. A driver for it can be installed even if there is already some other printer attached to the computer.

Open Notepad (or some other text editor), copy and paste the following PostScript code snippet into an editor. Edit the code to correspond the directory where file1.ps and file2.ps were saved. Remember to to use \ instead of \ in path names. Save the results to some directory as file12.ps.

% Written by Helge Blischke, see
% http://groups.google.com/groups?ic=1&selm=3964A684.49D%40srz-berlin.de
% The following 2 procs encapsulate the jobs to be processed
% much as is done with EPS images:
        /tweak_save save def
        /tweak_dc countdictstack def
        /tweak_oc count 1 sub def
        userdict begin
}bind def

        count tweak_oc sub{pop}repeat
        countdictstack tweak_dc sub{end}repeat
        tweak_save restore
}bind def

% Now, add your jobs like this:


% and so on.

Start GSview to view merged PostScript files. File -> Open... -> file12.ps. ...and convert it back to PDF: File -> Convert... -> Device: pdfwrite -> OK -> file12.pdf

Other alternatives include CutePDF Writer & PDF Toolkit

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Does CutePDF stitch together PDF's? I thought it only "saved" docs to PDF's? –  KronoS Dec 16 '10 at 19:26
should be able print multiple docs into a single PDF, haven't tried myself, though. @kron –  Sathya Dec 16 '10 at 19:31
You don't need to use gsview. gs itself can do the trick, with no ps in the intermediate. Just a single line: gs -dSAFER -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOutputFile=output.pdf input1.pdf input2.pdf –  frabjous Dec 16 '10 at 20:44
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