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

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?!

asked Feb 14, 2012 at 13:00 Andrei Andre Andrei Andre 111 2 2 gold badges 2 2 silver badges 4 4 bronze badges

What exactly do you mean by "have a combined file of those two files"? Would concatenate and merge these two files into 1 PDF work for you?

Commented Feb 23, 2012 at 23:03 Adobe Acrobat or Adobe Acrobat Reader? Commented Aug 24, 2012 at 23:13

@AndreiAndre Many good solutions were posted to your question. Maybe you could choose the one which fits all your needs and mark it as accepted.

Commented Feb 11, 2013 at 9:35 Some other solutions: PyPDF2/PDFSam/PDFMerge, LaTeX's pdfpages , Multivalent, PDFshuffler etc.. Commented Mar 26, 2023 at 11:44

8 Answers 8

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"

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Save it as [email protected] 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

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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

Update: Version which uses current folder name as file name for generated pdf

@echo off setlocal enabledelayedexpansion :: Concat all paths fromselected files and save it as command FOR %%A IN (%*) DO (set command=!command! %%A) :: Take path from first selected file and save it as path set path=%~dp1 echo %path% :: Check if a trailing slash is present. If yes, remove it IF %path:~-1%==\ SET path=%path:~0,-1% :: Get last folder from path FOR %%F in ("%path%") do (set lastFolder=%%~nxF) :: Call pdftk, pass on command. use lastFolder as filename pdftk.exe %command% cat output "%path%\%lastFolder%.pdf"