Combine PDFs
Mac Tip #283/04-April-2007

It’s extremely easy to make PDFs, as I explained in How to make PDFs in OS X, Mac Tip #97/16-April-2003.

Recently though, I made a PDF from one Microsoft Word document that was divided into several sections, each with separate page numbering. I was rather surprised to find that instead of a single PDF, there were four. Obviously this was related to the use of sections in the source file.

After some Googling around how to combine the PDFs into a single file. I turned up the free Combine PDFs, which worked well.

I opened Combine PDFs. It displayed a window. I dragged each PDF onto the window in turn, making sure to drop each below the previous, so as to keep the pages in order. The software displayed each page from each PDF, providing the opportunity to remove pages or change the sequence.

When done, I edited the Title, and Author information and pressed the Merge PDFs… button. Moments later I had a single PDF of some 340 pages. Brilliant!

When I posted about this on my blog one reader, Derek Miller, kindly pointed me to another, similar piece of software called PDFLab, also free. I downloaded it and tried it out. It worked in the same way and I was very satisfied.

If you need to combine PDFs then try out either or both of these two fine pieces of freeware.