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

I have 3 folders:

Folder 1 
Folder 2
Folder 3

In each folder I have 5 pdf files:

    Folder 1 
       file1.pdf
       file2.pdf
    Folder 2
       file1.pdf
       file2.pdf
    Folder 3
       file1.pdf
       file2.pdf

I want that in each folder to have a combined file of those two files:

    Folder 1 
       binder.pdf
    Folder 2
       binder.pdf
    Folder 3
       binder.pdf

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?!

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"

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

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"

If you're on Linux (or Mac, or any environment where it is installed), you can use a command-line tool called ghostscript to combine them.

gs -dNOPAUSE -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOUTPUTFILE=combinedpdf.pdf -dBATCH file1.pdf file2.pdf file3.pdf

You can also use the following to combine all files in the current folder

gs -dNOPAUSE -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOUTPUTFILE=combinedpdf.pdf -dBATCH *.pdf

You can download ghostscript here. There's a Windows version as well, but I didn't test it.

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

Related

Recent Posts