MacMost Now 375: Merging PDF Documents in Preview

You can use Preview in Snow Leopard to merge documents and pages within documents. It works a little differently than it did in Leopard because you can have multiple documents in the sidebar which can confuse things.

Comments: 20 Responses to “MacMost Now 375: Merging PDF Documents in Preview”

    Ethiel
    15 years ago

    Hi Gary, I want to thank you for all these videos. I have learned so much! I also, got your book and is very interesting. Thank you. I have a question if you don't mind. I combined a 3500 pages pdf into one, however, they are not in numerical order, i.e. page 1 is page 1000. My question is, can I put all these pages in numerical order? Do you know a trick that you can share? Thanks in advance.
    v/r

    Ethiel

      15 years ago

      Wow. A 3500-page document! Never thought of that. I don't think there is a way to re-order them based on page number as Preview doesn't know what text on the page represents the page number. You can select more than one and drag them around, so if they are in groups, you might be able to do it manually rather quickly.

    Ethiel
    15 years ago

    Yes a 3500 pages doc. I want to thank you for your prompt response. Keep up the good work. Your site is outstanding! A lot of useful info. I want to let you know that every time somebody ask me about mac I refer them to your site. God bless

    v/r

    Ethiel

    Paul
    15 years ago

    Great episode, Gary. I have always used Acrobat Pro to merge documents, but this looks a lot easier. Thanks.

    Xzoky
    15 years ago

    Hi there !
    Strange I've just noticed this, since I've been watching your show for quite some time now. How did you make your Mac's selected menu items purple ?
    Nice PDF tip by the way, it saved me some precious time.
    Rock on !

      15 years ago

      They aren't. It is just an artifact of the video compression.

    Elisa
    15 years ago

    You wouldn't believe how much time this tip has saved me. I get hundreds of emails with pdf attachments that I need to print, instead of opening them and printing them individually, I drag the paperclips from Mail into a file on my desktop. Then open them in Preview and using the select all, merge them into 1 document and print. This tip saved me from printing 300+ pdf attachments separately.

    Jim
    15 years ago

    GARY...
    I attempted to search out an answer on my own.. and was really frustrated. Your video solution helped me complete a teeth grinding job application under a drop-dead timeline. I was ignorant of how to merge these two files. THANKS just THANKS!

    Magicpony
    14 years ago

    I can't get it to work. When I drag one document to another (and get the blue bar closest to the title of the second doc.) and drop it nothing happens. Also it won't let me drag a page from one doc to another. I don't get the plus sign. I'm on 10.6.4.

      14 years ago

      Not sure what could be wrong. Try it again with other documents. Experiment a bit.

    Felixfatfunk
    14 years ago

    I have been trying to rearrange in Pages to no avail as the document was not written as separate pages. So this idea solves the problem, after finished edit. Is there a way of separating a page and moving it around on a sequenced written document in Pages? I can't find anything (ilife09).

    Cheers and great clear video

      14 years ago

      The only way to move content around in Pages like that would be to copy and paste.

    Danny F.
    14 years ago

    Some of my clients are still using Tiger and unfortunately, this won't work! After some digging, I found Batch PDF Merger and this little app does the trick. In addition to merging, you can rearrange the files pretty easily in the window.

    raf
    14 years ago

    I have tried this so many times and it has not worked consistently. I finally took my macbook pro into the Mac store. They said some of the PDFs I am trying to merge are locked, and therefore can not be edited/merged with other PDFs. Any truth to this? How do you unlock a PDF?

    Thanks.

      14 years ago

      Could be. Hard to say without seeing them. PDFs can have all sorts of security on them. Try opening those particular PDFs and looking at their properties, maybe?

    Mamdouh Agaibi
    13 years ago

    I can’t get it to work. When I drag one document to another (and get the blue bar closest to the title of the second doc.) and drop it nothing happens. Also it won’t let me drag a page from one doc to another. I don’t get the plus sign

    Drew Walters
    13 years ago

    Gary,

    I've done the merging, but I want to retain the "chapters" in my pdf. After I merged them they all fall under one title instead of having multiple titles in the Table of Contents view. Any ideas on how I can bring back those titles for quicker reading?

      13 years ago

      I don't think you can, not in Preview. If you want functionality like "chapters" you probably need to use a PDF authoring tool like Adobe Acrobat.

    Kurt Schnabel
    12 years ago

    Thanks Gary that helps a lot

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