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When I try to merge two .pdf files using Imagemagick

convert pdf1.pdf pdf2.pdf temp.pdf

the resulting temp.pdf file seems to have very low resolution. How can I keep the resolution same as in the source files?

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migrated from stackoverflow.com Oct 11 '09 at 20:50

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3 Answers

up vote 7 down vote

Barns's right, but if pdftk didn't work try ghostscript.

gs -dBATCH -dNOPAUSE -q -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOutputFile=temp.pdf pdf1.pdf pdf2.pdf
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Yes. This is perfect for merging pdfs. Just download and install converter.exe from cutepdf.com/products/cutepdf/writer.asp and use your command. Except, for win32, it's gswin32c, if the GPLGS directory in the program files folder is in the path. – Shadow2531 Feb 8 '10 at 11:38
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up vote 4 down vote

Imagemagick's convert command is normally used for converting image files from one format to another, and in this case, it is possible that it is actually performing an internal conversion of sorts before outputting the two "images" (PDFs) into a single file.

I would suggest you consider using the PDF Toolkit (pdftk) instead http://www.accesspdf.com/pdftk/

From the examples on the website, this should be as simple as:

pdftk pdf1.pdf pdf2.pdf cat output temp.pdf
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I'm running on OS X 10.6.1 and I tried to install pdftk via Macports. It seems that pdftk is deprecated on Mac, the installation would not finish. So, I tried to do this using Imagemagick. – jraja Sep 27 '09 at 13:41
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up vote 0 down vote

I'm not sure how you can keep the exact same resolution -- if that is possible with PDF at all...
But using the -density option might help. I just used this to convert some PDFs into PNGs:

convert -density 200x200 in.pdf out.png
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