How to merge several PDF files?

Question

There are a lot of software in Windows to merge PDF files but how can we do the same in Ubuntu?

score 583 · Answer 1 · edited Jan 10 '20 at 08:47

583

`pdftk`

To merge two pdf files, file1.pdf and file2.pdf:

pdftk file1.pdf file2.pdf cat output mergedfile.pdf

More info available here^{Way Back Machine}.

To install, run:

sudo snap install pdftk

edited Jan 10 '20 at 08:47

Flimm

41,766

answered Aug 21 '10 at 07:42

Rojan

6,564

14

pdftk is buggy - https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/pdftk/+bug/779908.
gs might be slow, but does the work perfectly [IgnitE's answer]
– Pushpak Dagade Apr 03 '13 at 11:05
@PushpakDagade ghostscript messes up with annotations, particularly comments that have been checked (check box ticked with checkmark), will no longer have this checkmark. I am not aware of a way around this. Also, if you merge PDF v1.5 + 1.6, output will be 1.4 by default. That is strange behavior. – Jonathan Komar May 19 '16 at 14:12
This is beautiful. Working pretty fine on 14.04.5 LTS and we can merge PDF's with different page size/orientation. Produces high quality and low size files. Thank you! – Geppettvs D'Constanzo Sep 03 '17 at 20:22
4

pdftk has an unusual usage where commands cat and output follow variadic input arguments and followed again by an output argument. – Jeff Puckett Nov 07 '17 at 03:47
8

The package seems to have been removed in 2018.04. – Nicolas Raoul May 09 '18 at 09:07
2

@NicolasRaoul I just downloaded it as a snap install. – Max Aug 31 '18 at 14:55
@Max do you know what is the difference between the two snaps at https://snapcraft.io/search?category=&q=pdftk ? – Nicolas Raoul Sep 01 '18 at 14:55
3

FYI: sudo snap install pdftk - there is no release candidate for the aptitude app anymore, it was deprecated by the author, who created the snap package. – GrayedFox Oct 19 '18 at 14:30
@GrayedFox in 18.04 – cipricus Dec 03 '19 at 19:02
@NicolasRaoul in 18.04 – cipricus Dec 03 '19 at 19:03
@NicolasRaoul On the website, pdftk-smoser is marked as obsolete. – Flimm Jan 10 '20 at 08:57
A handy shortcut: pdftk file* cat output mergedfile.pdf – Nir Feb 23 '20 at 12:56
1

Nice tool. Works like a charm on my Ubuntu 18.04 LTS – zugzug May 20 '20 at 14:31
6

It works great. To install on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS do: sudo apt install pdftk-java – michael Jun 09 '20 at 08:27
jdk is an overkill and should not be necessary. – Timo Aug 31 '20 at 16:44
2

I have the following error: Error: Failed to open PDF file: ... – desmond13 Nov 06 '20 at 08:39
cat is not needed I think. – Timo Apr 24 '21 at 18:41
1

sudo snap install pdftk can be used in Ubuntu 20.04 and pdftk is accepting "*.pdf" as a valid parameter. – Celal Ergün May 27 '21 at 07:55
https://askubuntu.com/questions/1028522/how-can-i-install-pdftk-in-ubuntu-18-04-and-later it exists as pdftk-java and can be used as pdftk – qwr Aug 18 '21 at 01:02
pdftk does not work if there spaces in the filenames – CJ7 Jul 15 '22 at 07:09
Snap is not necessary anymore : sudo apt install pdftk – Reynadan Jun 12 '23 at 12:07

score 311 · Accepted Answer · edited Oct 19 '23 at 00:50

311

PDF Arranger formerly known as PDF-Shuffler.

If you want a tool with a simple GUI, try pdfarranger. It allows for merging of PDFs as well as rearranging and deleting pages. For batch processing and/or more complicated tasks, pdftk is of course more powerful.

Screenshot of PDF-Shuffler

To install PDF Arranger in Ubuntu 20.04 and later open the terminal and type:

sudo apt install pdfarranger

edited Oct 19 '23 at 00:50

karel

114,770

answered Aug 21 '10 at 10:08

Marcel Stimberg

41,762

I tried this - it didn't work on 10.04 – David Oneill Mar 13 '12 at 02:06
On 12.04, pdfshuffler always complains that there are "too many values to unpack", making it unusable. – despens Apr 12 '13 at 12:15
For me it works under 12.04 64-bit, pdfshuffler version 0.6.0 – user1251007 Jan 08 '14 at 09:35
10

Installs and works like a charm on 14.04. Thanks a bunch!! – Zlatty Feb 12 '14 at 20:26
I used to use pdftk for this behavior. Thanks for the PDF Shuffle reference. It looks really slick. – csgeek Dec 11 '14 at 15:51
1

I can also confirm pdfshuffler works fine on 14.04 amd64. – conualfy Dec 28 '14 at 21:35
This is the quickest and easiest solution. Thank you! (Ubuntu 14.04 64-bit) – The Unknown Dev Mar 12 '16 at 21:25
This works well in many cases but I noticed that it stripped out hyperlinks. Using pdftk does not strip out hyperlinks. So, if there is any complexity to the PDFs that you are concatenating, I would use the command line tool; at the very least, thoroughly test your output file. – revnoah Apr 16 '16 at 21:47
just tried for one case but I got an error "multiple definitions in dictionary" so it could not create an output. their issue tracking on that is open for quite some time without resolution so I assume the project is not very active, would not recommend! – SCBuergel Apr 28 '16 at 22:30
2

Also works great on 16.04.1 – Sanjay Manohar Nov 07 '16 at 12:36
Gave it a try and works well on 17.04. Very easy to use for basic merge. – COil Oct 16 '17 at 10:11
This doesn't work for combining encrypted transcripts. – Ruthvik Vaila Mar 29 '18 at 16:10
2

Tried PdfShuffler 0.6.0 (apt-get install pdfshuffler) on Ubuntu 14.0 64-bit and it works with one caveat - It has problem dealing with some special characters in the filename (in my case pdfshuffler cannot load filename with #) – Tzunghsing David Wong Jan 24 '19 at 22:28
Version 0.6.0 works like a charm on 18.04 – Bas Swinckels Jan 07 '20 at 13:47
Works greatly on 18.04 – Topera Feb 03 '20 at 17:59
Just used it on 19.10, to merge and crop a series of pdf, worked like a charm. – Will59 Mar 09 '20 at 10:32
12

This tool has been renamed to pdfarranger as of Ubuntu 20.04. You can still install pdfshuffler via apt, but it is just an empty pointer to pdfarranger which is also the command you'll need after install. – Carl Zulauf Aug 03 '20 at 21:29
This is crashing in ubuntu 16.04. I have tried pdftk which is not gui based application – Gireesh Mar 10 '21 at 10:04
@CarlZulauf can you provide a link to documentation showing this renaming of pdfarranger? I'm not seeing any evidence of this in apt and not able to get pdfshuffler to work at that. – topher217 Apr 07 '22 at 09:06
@topher217 APT will tell you pdfshuffler is just pdfarranger. On Ubuntu 20.04 try $ apt show pdfshuffler and look closely. – Carl Zulauf Apr 12 '22 at 16:40
@CarlZulauf maybe you or I have a manually added an apt repo to pdfshuffler? I'm not seeing anything. Here is the pastebin of the output from apt show pdfshuffler. This is after running sudo apt update just in case. I'm on Ubuntu 20.04 with apt -v returning apt 1.6.14 (amd64). The only docs on pdfarranger I found were the github repo which doesn't appear to give any apt based instructions for installation but rather via pip. – topher217 Apr 13 '22 at 01:48
Works well in Ubuntu 22.04 as well! – anoopjohn Jan 08 '23 at 00:00

score 271 · Answer 3 · edited Aug 10 '18 at 23:08

271

Ghostscript is a package (available by default in Ubuntu) that enables you to view or print PostScript and PDF files to other formats, or to convert those files to other formats.
To use Ghostscript to combine PDF files, type something like the following:

gs -dBATCH -dNOPAUSE -q -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -dAutoRotatePages=/None -sOutputFile=finished.pdf  file1.pdf file2.pdf

Here is a brief explanation of the command:

gs         starts the Ghostscript program.
-dBATCH    once Ghostscript processes the PDF files, it should exit.
           If you don't include this option, Ghostscript will just keep running.
-dNOPAUSE  forces Ghostscript to process each page without pausing for user interaction.
-q         stops Ghostscript from displaying messages while it works
-sDEVICE=pdfwrite 
           tells Ghostscript to use its built-in PDF writer to process the files.
-sOutputFile=finished.pdf
           tells Ghostscript to save the combined PDF file with the specified name.
-dAutoRotatePages=/None
           Acrobat Distiller parameter AutoRotatePages controls the automatic orientation selection algorithm: For instance: -dAutoRotatePages=/None or /All or /PageByPage.

Your input files don't even need to be PDF files. You can also use PostScript or EPS files, or any mixture of the three.

There is a lot you can do with Ghostscript. You can read its documentation for more details.

_Source

edited Aug 10 '18 at 23:08

SebMa

2,291

answered Feb 17 '13 at 02:27

ignite

8,936

3

True, but it's incredibly slow. I just tried concatenating 45 x 400K, single-page PDFs. pdftk took 0m0.484s, gs took 1m32.898s (that's almost 200x slower) The file from gs was about 21% smaller though. – aidan Mar 22 '13 at 06:47
7

this command also works if you use a wildcard for the list of files to be combined. for example, replace file1.pdf file2.pdf with file*.pdf – Antonios Hadjigeorgalis May 29 '14 at 13:58
2

For me gs worked with some "non conformant" PDFs where pdftk would just run forever. – ntc2 Dec 09 '14 at 04:37
This worked perfectly for my need! – dsh Jan 23 '15 at 02:23
1

Use -dPDFSETTINGS=/prepress option from quality improvement. All thanks due to the original contributor – Mohnish Apr 20 '16 at 11:58
14

@AntoniosHadjigeorgalis Just for reference and good understanding: that's not the command supporting wildcards, that's actually the shell replacing file*.pdf with file1.pdf file2.pdf before passing the arguments to the command. – Midgard Jun 15 '16 at 10:15
4

I merged ~20 small pdfs into a single file in a fraction of a femto-second with gs. No need to download 70MB of pdftk. Thanks @ignite! – Campa Jul 15 '16 at 12:37
+1 Worked with encrypted pdfs as well (these annoying files that can be viewed but not merged without a password). – Sir_FZ Sep 28 '16 at 11:57
2

This worked fine for me on Ubuntu 16.04 with no extra downloads. Merging 4 pages was almost instantaneous. – Paolo Mioni Oct 25 '16 at 06:24
@aidan sounds like gs rerenders the files instead of just copying the content. This might be a good thing if you want a distiller like workflow – Thorbjørn Ravn Andersen Nov 07 '16 at 13:27
1

The gs method will break the href and url link in the pdf created by pdflatex. pdfshuffler can keep the link. – HD189733b Dec 16 '18 at 00:35
I'm using this to concatenate 3 files, and gs inexplicably takes the title of one of them and uses it as the title of the new document (shown in the title bar by the PDF viewer). I wonder if the new title could be specified explicitly. – MWB Mar 28 '21 at 21:58
This works:gs -dBATCH -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOutputFile=finished.pdf file1.pdf file2.pdf, no need for the -q and -dnopause which did not help to output more silent. No need for dAutoRotatePages. – Timo Apr 24 '21 at 18:40
Worked really well, I used gs -dBATCH -dNOPAUSE -q -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -dAutoRotatePages=/None -sOutputFile=finished.pdf * (with the wildcard). Great, and open source. Thanks! – Giovanni Bassi Feb 15 '22 at 22:39

score 163 · Answer 4 · edited Jan 10 '20 at 08:48

163

You also also use pdfunite to merge pdf documents :

pdfunite in-1.pdf in-2.pdf in-n.pdf out.pdf

To install pdfunite if it is not installed already, run:

sudo apt-get install poppler-utils

edited Jan 10 '20 at 08:48

Flimm

41,766

answered Nov 12 '14 at 12:09

BЈовић

4,564

21

WARNING: An existing file out.pdf will be overwritten without warning, so pdfunite *.pdf won't work as expected. – krlmlr Dec 04 '14 at 15:02
2

@krlmlr You can always put the output into another directory. – BЈовић Dec 04 '14 at 15:05
1

Fair enough, cp also overwrites last argument without warning. This is just for rushing users (like myself) -- I was lucky I had a backup of the file in question... – krlmlr Dec 04 '14 at 15:08
2

Upvote: This is a simple command-line tool without a click-and-drool GUI like many of the other answers here. It nicely encapsulates the complexities of the (largely equivalent) GhostScript solution. – tripleee Apr 13 '15 at 14:28
2

This is also very fast. Does the job well. On a very slow server (aws t1.micro), gs takes 9 secs, pdftk takes 4 secs and this pdfunite takes 0.9 secs for merging two files! – rsmoorthy Jul 15 '15 at 19:49
1

This is also available under Cygwin. – user643722 Jun 15 '16 at 10:36
1

To get this on Ubuntu 16.04, run sudo apt-get install poppler-utils. You'll then be able to type pdfunite --help and see that it's installed. – Volomike Jun 12 '17 at 22:38
1

Interesting: pdfunite is available by default in Ubuntu MATE 20.04. (I certainly didn't install it...) – Frank N Jun 22 '21 at 08:28
1

The sheets were returned with different sizes. – user140259 Dec 10 '21 at 18:19

score 38 · Answer 5 · edited Mar 11 '17 at 18:59

38

PDF Chain

A very nice solution is PDFChain. It's GUI is a frontend of PDFTK where you can merge, split or even add some background to your PDF files.

edited Mar 11 '17 at 18:59

Community

1

answered Jan 31 '11 at 16:16

Vincenzo

2,675

This is the best answer. It works perfectly, regardless of the Ubuntu version. – Paulo Coghi Feb 01 '17 at 17:33
Worked on Ubuntu 14.04 without hassle! – my account_ram Apr 25 '17 at 15:07
Works great on Ubuntu 18.04! – orschiro Nov 17 '17 at 16:15
1

so goo that it was removed from ubuntu software in 18.04(!?) – user2413 Aug 06 '18 at 06:42
@user2413 that's a snap store, not the only source for software in Ubuntu. Trying to search in apt didn't give any results either though :/ – jena Sep 05 '19 at 13:54
1

How is this installed in newer Ubuntu versions? – Flimm Jan 10 '20 at 08:49

score 19 · Answer 6 · edited Apr 13 '17 at 12:36

19

An alternative approach is to use Latex as explained in this post (without root access assuming that you have pdflatex installed): https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/8662/merge-two-pdf-files-output-by-latex

This is useful in case you do not have the mentioned tools nor root privileges, but you do have pdflatex.

I copy the tex code below to merge file1.pdf and file2.pdf. Create a file called output.tex and put:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{pdfpages}
\begin{document}
\includepdf[pages=-]{file1}
\includepdf[pages=-]{file2}
\end{document}

And to compile, simply use: pdflatex output.tex

The merged file will be named as output.pdf.

edited Apr 13 '17 at 12:36

Community

1

answered Feb 02 '17 at 18:23

emre

301
2
5

This is the best approach because the result will always be there, no bugs – Billal Begueradj Sep 14 '20 at 09:04
1

This breaks hyperlinks. – hasanghaforian Oct 07 '23 at 06:27

score 13 · Answer 7 · edited Jan 10 '20 at 08:49

13

Give PDFMod a try, it’s from the GNOME project:

https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/PdfMod

sudo apt install pdfmod

edited Jan 10 '20 at 08:49

Flimm

41,766

answered Sep 16 '10 at 21:35

Detnuomnu

2,007

does not do merging. – user2413 Aug 06 '18 at 06:44
1

it did merging in the past, now it's just crashing, I used the pdfshuffler instead and it worked great – jena Dec 11 '18 at 21:41

score 11 · Answer 8 · edited Jan 10 '20 at 08:51

11

Use pdfsam http://www.pdfsam.org/ it's very good for splitting and merging pdfs

sudo apt install pdfsam

edited Jan 10 '20 at 08:51

Flimm

41,766

answered Jun 03 '13 at 13:32

R.Sathish Kumar

111
1
3

Used it under 19.10 to merge file: simple interface, a few options, works very well. But other features such as crop are premium options. sudo apt-get install pdfshuffler did the trick :-) – Will59 Mar 09 '20 at 10:35

score 10 · Answer 9 · edited Jan 10 '20 at 08:50

10

I use pdfseparate to extract specific pages from big pdf file:

pdfseparate -f  156 -l 157 input.pdf  output_%d.pdf 
pdfseparate -f  1   -l 2   input.pdf  output_%d.pdf

and aftewards I join them all via command:

pdfunite $(ls -v output_*.pdf | tr '\n' ' ') out$(date  +%Y-%m-%d_%H_%M_%S ).pdf

This joins:

output_1.pdf output_2.pdf output_156.pdf output_157.pdf

into:

out2014-12-14_23_25_36.pdf

May be there is an easier way how to cope... :-)

Installation instructions:

sudo apt install poppler-utils

edited Jan 10 '20 at 08:50

Flimm

41,766

answered Dec 14 '14 at 22:37

xerostomus

990
9
20

2

The process substitution is superfluous and potentially even harmful. A correct an much simpler command line is pdfunite output_*.pdf out$(date +%Y-%m-%d-%H_%M_%S).pdf but it lacks the ordering of ls -v. An obvious and trivial fix is to name your files so that they naturally sort in the order you want to include them. If you absolutely want ls -v, you can at least lose the pipe to tr, which accomplishes nothing here. – tripleee Apr 13 '15 at 14:24

score 6 · Answer 10 · answered Sep 16 '10 at 21:42

6

You can also use jPDFTweak, pdfsam or pdfjam.

(That said, I use pdftk.)

answered Sep 16 '10 at 21:42

frabjous

6,431

1

It would be better if these were separate answers so that they could be upvoted separately and edited separately. – Flimm Jan 10 '20 at 08:51

score 4 · Answer 11 · answered Aug 21 '10 at 06:29

4

You can use pdftk to merge and modify PDF documents in general. Alternatively there's an online service to do just that: http://www.pdfmerge.com/

answered Aug 21 '10 at 06:29

joschi

235

1

pdftk is mentioned in this answer: https://askubuntu.com/a/2802/2355 – Flimm Jan 10 '20 at 08:53

score 2 · Answer 12 · answered May 20 '20 at 21:05

You can see use the free and open source pdftools (disclaimer: I am the author of it).

It is basically a Python interface to the Latex pdfpages package.

To merge pdf files one by one, you can run:

pdftools --input-file file1.pdf --input-file file2.pdf --output output.pdf

To merge together all the pdf files in a directory, you can run:

pdftools --input-dir ./dir_with_pdfs --output output.pdf

score 1 · Answer 13 · answered Oct 14 '16 at 15:25

Here is my approach:

I wanted it to be easily accessible so I created a right-click shortcut in Nautilus (see https://help.ubuntu.com/community/NautilusScriptsHowto)
I wanted it to be very quick so I used pdfunite
pdfunite only accepts the filepaths in the middle of the command so I had to scratch my head to manage the spaces in the filepaths. So I took the assumption that all filepaths will start with "/home/" and end with ".pdf"

Here is the result:

#!/bin/sh
CLEANED_FILE_PATHS=$(echo $NAUTILUS_SCRIPT_SELECTED_FILE_PATHS | sed 's,.pdf /home/,.pdf\\n/home/,g')
echo $CLEANED_FILE_PATHS | bash -c 'IFS=$'"'"'\n'"'"' read -d "" -ra x;pdfunite "${x[@]}" merged.pdf'

Juste paste this script in

/home/your_username/.local/share/nautilus/scripts

and name it "merge_pdfs.sh" (for example). Then make it executable (right-click on merge_pdfs.sh -> Permissions tab -> tick "Allow executing file as a program"

So now to merge pdf files, you just have to select them -> right click -> scripts -> merge_pdfs.sh and it will create a "merged.pdf" file in the same directory

Hope it helps!

score 0 · Answer 14 · answered Feb 06 '23 at 14:04

0

I did not find pdfarranger in snap (Ubuntu 22.04).

Thus I installed sudo snap install pdfmerger.

This tool also has a simplistic GUI and worked perfectly for me.

answered Feb 06 '23 at 14:04

hb0

221

Ciro Santilli OurBigBook.com · Answer 15 · 2024-01-24T04:46:14.117

qpdf

This also worked for me:

sudo apt install qpdf
qpdf --empty --pages in1.pdf in2.pdf in3.pdf -- out.pdf

For some encryption related reason which I don't fully understand pdftk in1.pdf in2.pdf in3.pdf cat output out.pdf, pdftk was failing with:

Error: Invalid PDF: unknown.encryption.type.r

on certain PDFs I downloaded, even though they didn't require a password to open.

Related threads:

Source code: https://github.com/qpdf/qpdf

License: Apache.

Project description:

QPDF is a command-line tool and C++ library that performs content-preserving transformations on PDF files. It supports linearization encryption, and numerous other features. It can also be used for splitting and merging files, creating PDF files (but you have to supply all the content yourself), and inspecting files for study or analysis. QPDF does not render PDFs or perform text extraction, and it does not contain higher-level interfaces for working with page contents. It is a low-level tool for working with the structure of PDF files and can be a valuable tool for anyone who wants to do programmatic or command-line-based manipulation of PDF files.

Tested on Ubuntu 23.10, pdftk 3.3.3, qpdf 11.5.0.

How to merge several PDF files?

15 Answers15

`pdftk`

Installation instructions:

Linked

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