Portable Document Format (PDF), is a file format developed by Adobe in 1992 to present documents, including text formatting and images, in a manner independent of application software, hardware, and operating systems. There are already many tools processing PDF, although the PDF struct is very complex. So merging PDF files into a single PDF file is very easy. Now let’s introduce these 3 easy methods to you on how to merge PDF files.
Method 1: online service – ilovepdf
ilovepdf is an online service that provides various tools to manage PDF files, also it has a tool to merge PDF files.
1. Visit the merge PDF page directly.
2. Click the button “Select PDF files”, select your PDF files.
3. Order the PDF files, then click the button “Merge PDF”, you will get the merged PDF file.
Note:
ilovepdf only merges all PDF pages, it can not specify the specific PDF pages.
The alternatives online PDF services are smallpdf, pdf2go, etc. You can try these services too.
Method 2: command line tool – QPDF
QPDF is a free command-line program that can convert one PDF file to another equivalent PDF file. It is capable of performing a variety of transformations such as linearization, encryption, and decryption of PDF files. It also has many options for inspecting or checking PDF files. QPDF includes support for rotating, merging and splitting PDFs through the ability to copy objects from one PDF file into another and to manipulate the list of pages in a PDF file.
1. Install QPDF to your PC.
On Windows, you can install QPDF through scoop. Or you can get the executable file directly.
scoop install qpdfOn Mac, you can install QPDF through homebrew.
brew install qpdf2. Now run the command to merge PDFs to a single PDF file.
test1.pdf, test2.pdf is your source PDF files, the merge.pdf is the merged PDF file.
qpdf --empty --pages test1.pdf test2.pdf -- merge.pdf
Note: you can also specify the PDF page range to merge.
qpdf –empty –pages test1.pdf 1 test2.pdf 2-3 — merge2.pdf
Method 3: GUI tool – z3kit PDFMatrix
The z3kit PDFMatrix is an ease-to-use tool, it can merge your PDF files, specify the PDF page ranges, merge odd or even pages, etc.
1. Download z3kit PDFMatrix and install it.
2. Click the button “PDF Merge”, then click the button “Add” to add PDF files.
3. Adjust the sequence of the PDF files and set PDF page ranges(optional), then click the button “Start to Merge”.
All is done. Open the output path to view your merged PDF file.
Conclusion
We have introduced you with 3 methods to merge PDF files. Online services have too few functions, command line tool QPDF is too complex to use, z3kit PDFMatrix is easy to use and has many functions that satisfy you, so we highly recommend you to try it.
Note:
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