I’ve got a fair number of PDFs that need merging and am looking for a good, preferably drag and drop, utility to do it. Already got Acrobat but its a bit slow and clunky (I really want to just drop pdf B onto pdf A and have it added to pdf A without me doing anything else.

Any suggestions?

Nitro

http://www.smallpdf.com is a really useful online tool

Apple OS app Preview – doesn’t work by drag/drop though ( recall you may be on Mac)

Just stick em in a folder and let acrobat do its combine files function while you have a nice cuppa.

With Acrobat you should be able to right-click the files in explorer and have them just merge using Acrobat.

Easy as.

Those recommending Acrobat – are you speaking of the full paid version or the free reader ?

Could be Mac or Windows …. pref Windows

With Acrobat you should be able to right-click the files in explorer and have them just merge using Acrobat.

Indeed and this is how I’ve done it before, but I still have about 4 clicks and filenaming to do for each one and I have about 300 pairs of PDFs to combine into 300 single PDFs so not ideal.

Giving Nitro Pro a go to see.

Hmmm, Nitro nice and simple/quick but you still have to manually name the file every time – I’m not paying over £100 for that 🙁

I’ve used: https://pdfrider.codeplex.com/

I think it has a command line utility.

PDF binder is simple but effective
Drag the docs in the order you want, create merged file name press go

Those recommending Acrobat – are you speaking of the full paid version or the free reader ?

Full-paid version (Acrobat Pro in my case). The reader allows you to read and comment on PDFs, while the Pro version allows you merge, move pages, copy comments etc

PDF Split and Merge is brilliant. I use it all the time!

PDFSAM

You can use PrimoPDF which is free PDF printer software.
In Options go to Creation >> Saving PDF and you change the action if PDF exists to append rather than overwrite.
the just print to the PrimoPDF printer and give each file the same name.

Preview on a mac does do drag and drop. Just open the thumnail pain in the left hand side of preview, and you can drag the thumbnails, or drag another PDF file into an existing doc.

Apple OS app Preview – doesn’t work by drag/drop though (recall you may be on Mac)

It does work with drag and drop. I’ve done it in the past and just checked again.
Open the 1st PDF in Preview, Select View, Thumbnails to see the pages in a sidebar. Scroll to the bottom, drag the next PDF into the sidebar. Can then save with the same filename as PDF1 or give it a new name.

andybanks beat me.

OK so an update that some may find useful.

BenjiM – I’ve already got PDFSAM and it’s OK but you still have to name the merged file manually which is a pain for the volume I’m dealing with.

I also have PDFmeld command line utility from Fytek but frankly it’s a little flakey and requires you to click an OK button for every file/command line you’re working on.

So in the end I’ve stuck with command line at it can be really quick once you’ve got a system set up.

I’ve found an excellent utility called PDFtk Free which seems very fast.
Basically I’m copying the filenames of the all files that need merging using a little utility I have that allows you to select multiple files then right click and ‘copy filenames.

Filenames then pasted into wordpad.

Use AF9 Replace Some Bytes to remove CRLFs where they’re not needed to give all the files that need merging on a single line i.e.
SFO045034.PDF,SFO045034(2).PDF
SFO045033.PDF,SFO045033(2).PDF
SFO045184.PDF,SFO045184(2).PDF
SFO045147.PDF,SFO045147(2).PDF

Import this file into a FilemakerPro database (you could prob use excel) which I’ve set up to check that the filenames to be merged match, and to add various bits of extra text and then export this data as a batch file i.e.
pdftk SFO045034.PDF SFO045034(2).PDF cat output \Merged\SFO045034.PDF
pdftk SFO045033.PDF SFO045033(2).PDF cat output \Merged\SFO045033.PDF
pdftk SFO045184.PDF SFO045184(2).PDF cat output \Merged\SFO045184.PDF
pdftk SFO045147.PDF SFO045147(2).PDF cat output \Merged\SFO045147.PDF

Then run the batch file in a command prompt. PDFtk processed 100 merge processes in less than 30 seconds 🙂

A happy ending 🙂

@andy and @slow thanks for that

Copying filenames – you don’t need a utility for this:

In windows explorer –
Select the required files in the right right pane (Ctrl+A is select all).
Press and hold “Shift” key, then right click on the selected files.
Choose “copy as path” from the context menu.
Paste into Word etc

(took me years to discover this!)

Don’t work here (XP). Anyway I don’t really want the whole path just the filenames.

Works for me in Windows7

Copy into a text file and use Find and Replace to remove the bit that’s not required.

Which would be fine if I was using Windows 7.

DIR /B > LIST.TXT will give you a text file with a list of filenames.