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0 pointsdiggan7mo ago0 comments

> joining multiple PDFs together

What about joining page 2-3 from PDF A with page 7-23 from PDF B? I remember that being a huge hassle on macOS when I was using it years ago. Think I ended up using some cloud service/website for it since the documents weren't confidential at all.

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episteme7mo ago

Can’t you just drag and drop across preview windows?

JKCalhoun7mo ago

You can — just drag the thumbnails.

The only downside to this, that I am aware of, is that a new PDF is created (rendered into a new PDF context). That can be lossy in some cases (if there are features that Preview does not support that get "dropped on the floor") and it is possible for the resulting PDF to be larger than the original(s).

digganOP7mo ago

Woah, page-by-page? I wasn't aware of that, I guess I'll give it a try the next time I'm in front of a Mac and need to join PDFs again :)

wonger_7mo ago

qpdf is usually my PDF wrangler of choice:

  qpdf --empty --pages a.pdf 2,3 b.pdf 7-23 -- out.pdf

mynameismon7mo ago

For those who have an installation of LaTeX: It is pretty easy to use LaTeX for this.

digganOP7mo ago

> It is pretty easy to use LaTeX for this.

Without looking it up the arguments/syntax, how do I do "join page 2-3 from PDF A with page 7-23 from PDF B"?

If it's more than one CLI invocation, easy to remember/find in the shell history and less than 80 characters long, I'm not sure I'd call it easy :)

fooofw7mo ago

pdfjam [1] uses a LaTeX package under the hood, is included with the TeX Live distribution and acts as a wrapper for a LaTeX package. With this, I believe your example would be:

    pdfjam PDF_A.pdf '2-3' PDF_B.pdf '7-23' --outfile joined.pdf

I'll admit that I had to look it up but that only took about 3 minutes (it's an example in the readme).

[1] https://github.com/pdfjam/pdfjam

jbn7mo ago

my go-to tool for this is pdftk.

See https://www.pdflabs.com/docs/pdftk-cli-examples/

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse

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episteme7mo ago

Can’t you just drag and drop across preview windows?

JKCalhoun7mo ago

You can — just drag the thumbnails.

digganOP7mo ago

Woah, page-by-page? I wasn't aware of that, I guess I'll give it a try the next time I'm in front of a Mac and need to join PDFs again :)

wonger_7mo ago

qpdf is usually my PDF wrangler of choice:

  qpdf --empty --pages a.pdf 2,3 b.pdf 7-23 -- out.pdf

mynameismon7mo ago

For those who have an installation of LaTeX: It is pretty easy to use LaTeX for this.

digganOP7mo ago

> It is pretty easy to use LaTeX for this.

Without looking it up the arguments/syntax, how do I do "join page 2-3 from PDF A with page 7-23 from PDF B"?

If it's more than one CLI invocation, easy to remember/find in the shell history and less than 80 characters long, I'm not sure I'd call it easy :)

fooofw7mo ago

pdfjam [1] uses a LaTeX package under the hood, is included with the TeX Live distribution and acts as a wrapper for a LaTeX package. With this, I believe your example would be:

    pdfjam PDF_A.pdf '2-3' PDF_B.pdf '7-23' --outfile joined.pdf

I'll admit that I had to look it up but that only took about 3 minutes (it's an example in the readme).

[1] https://github.com/pdfjam/pdfjam

jbn7mo ago

my go-to tool for this is pdftk.

See https://www.pdflabs.com/docs/pdftk-cli-examples/

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse