Adobe Acrobat: How to batch to combine multiple pdf files?

Question

I have 3 folders:

Folder 1 
Folder 2
Folder 3

In each folder I have 5 pdf files:

    Folder 1 
       file1.pdf
       file2.pdf
    Folder 2
       file1.pdf
       file2.pdf
    Folder 3
       file1.pdf
       file2.pdf

I want that in each folder to have a combined file of those two files:

    Folder 1 
       binder.pdf
    Folder 2
       binder.pdf
    Folder 3
       binder.pdf

Any idea? Don't tell to do it manually. This case is just to explain you my problem. Think that I have hundreds of folders. :) Maybe I can use another tool instead of Adobe Acrobat?!

Answer 1

If you're on Linux (or Mac, or any environment where it is installed), you can use a command-line tool called ghostscript to combine them.

gs -dNOPAUSE -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOUTPUTFILE=combinedpdf.pdf -dBATCH file1.pdf file2.pdf file3.pdf

You can also use the following to combine all files in the current folder

gs -dNOPAUSE -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOUTPUTFILE=combinedpdf.pdf -dBATCH *.pdf 

You can download ghostscript here. There's a Windows version as well, but I didn't test it.

Answer 2

You can do this with a short batch file and pdftk.exe (not pdftk Builder which is the GUI version).
There is no need to install anything.

Preparation

• download & extract pdftk with UniExtract
• Open ..\pdftk\bin* and copy pdftk.exe and libiconv2.dll to a folder of your choice

• create a new text file and paste the following code

  @echo off
  setlocal enabledelayedexpansion
  FOR %%A IN (%*) DO (set command=!command! %%A)
  pdftk.exe %command% cat output "%~dp1binder.pdf"
  

• Save it as merge@pdf.cmd in the same folder as pdftk.exe and libiconv2.dll
• create a shortcut of this .cmd and place it in your sendto folder (Win+R » shell:sendto)

Usage

• Go to a folder with some PDF files and select as many PDFs as you want
• Right-click them and choose the shortcut you just created

• a new binder PDF in the same folder will be created where all selected PDFs are merged into one

  

Answer 3

Try PDFMerge. But don't use the initial form where you have to select each file one by one. Instead, wait for the site to check your Java installation, then click on "Try the PDFMerge Java Applet" link. Once the applet is loaded and allowed to run, click on Choose files button, and you'll be able to select multiple files (to merge into one file).

The merging will be superfast and will be able to handle large number of files as nothing is uploaded into the website. Everything is done in your computer itself using your Java installation.

PS: Sorry if you're looking for an offline software that can be customized to create single PDF files across multiple folders.

Answer 4

If you are on mac you could create an Automator script to achieve this task. Make it as a folder action and simply drop the pdfs into it and see it happen! If you want I can show you how, are you running mac?

Answer 5

There is a new online Advanced PDF Manipulation tool called Sej-da which is still in Beta, which has a myriad of PDF functions (inc ability to merge multiple pdfs). It free & could well help your needs.

http://sejda.com/

A brief review of its functions was carried out only a couple of weeks ago by Revision 3:

http://revision3.com/tzdaily/sejda-online-pdf

Answer 6

CoolUtils has a product called PDF Combine which will take command line parameters and do exactly what you described above. It's very fast and cheap.

CCS 2/10/2013