What is Reddit's opinion of PDFtk?

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If you run a LAMP server, you could install pdftk, then execute that to concatenate pdf files.

$yournewpdffile = shellexec('pdftk file0.pdf file1.pdf file2.pdf cat output newfile.pdf')

PDFill will do what you want: http://www.pdfill.com/pdf_tools_free.html

Also, there is a GPL command line tool called pdftk: http://www.pdflabs.com/tools/pdftk-the-pdf-toolkit/ . I like this for batch processing.

pdftk combines pdfs at the command line. It's very simple, and the order you type the pdfs is the order they come out in. It's available for windows, linux and mac.

It does a whole heck of a lot of other stuff too, but I haven't had to use it for those things yet. Linky

It's always nice to hear that people are using the stuff you build, and it's even better when people offer to throw money your way, thanks!

Unfortunately, I can't find a simple way to add a "donate" button to the GitHub page -- which is weird, 'cause you'd think that that'd be a pretty common thing out there. Gratipay was supposed to do this, but they require Paypal, and I fucking hate Paypal, so I opted for a simple bitcoin link that I've added to the README. If you do bitcoins, by all means, toss a few my way :-)

As for your particular case, yeah that'd be really tough to make work for everyone. For Paperless' development, I try to follow the Unix philosophy of "do one thing well", so I'm trying to avoid accommodating edge cases when the scope is so specialised.

That isn't to say however that this can't work for you. I'd recommend a two-step process for your special case:

• Your scanner writes the PDFs to a separate directory
• You have a script in a cronjob (or Systemd timer) that:
  • Checks the directory for anything that looks like a collection of pages for a single document.
  • Once it's determined which files represent pages, you can use the amazing PDF Toolkit utility to join them into a new file.
  • Move that new file to Paperless' consumption directory and then delete the page-only files.

If this is something that's beyond your ability, you can post an issue on the GitHub issue tracker and I can write a script that does this and put it into the scripts/ directory (when I have time). I'd never make it a component of Paperless, but there's no harm in including it in a samples list of how to deal with edge cases.

Better yet, write something like this for your edge case and offer it up as a pull request. I can then add it to the scripts directory for others to use :-)

There are a couple of free (as in speech) PDF tools:

http://www.pdfsam.org/

http://www.pdflabs.com/tools/pdftk-the-pdf-toolkit/

It's really good of you to go to the effort of scanning all those pages!

The command line pdftk, pdftk server is free. I get it from my package manager. Source is here http://www.pdflabs.com/tools/pdftk-the-pdf-toolkit/pdftk-2.02-src.zip . It's quite slow though since you have to remove the pesky lines individually in the uncompressed files.

Thanks, /u/missblit. I ended up reading that link and using PDFtk Free and it works great.

After you install this on a windows machine, the command is:

pdftk.exe infile1.pdf infile2.pdf cat output outfile.pdf

Where

• infile1.pdf is the first file you want to concatenate
• infile2.pdf is the second file you want
• outfile.pdf is the concatenated PDF files.

Very useful and exactly what I was looking for, enjoy the gold.

Look into a third party named PdfToolkit. Call it from a send event script step, just like you would from the command prompt. I can help you with the syntax.

Pdf toolkit homepage

This solution only works in Windows. I'm positive there is a free mac equivalent if needed.

Edit: I just read above you have a mac client. I'll investigate a way to use applescript to fuse pdfs.

Edit2: Found this Link with a sample Applescript. Editing it to make it automatic should be a piece of cake. Of course, call it with a Perform Applescript from FileMaker.

[](/psychiatwi) Behold, the master tool for working with PDFs.

Linux users can go directly to the tool itself, pdftk, it's in your repositories and the manpage has examples.

Note that the "free" version of FPDI doesn't work with all PDF documents. If the PDFs you're manipulating are all ones that you created yourself you may be in the clear, but if you're dealing with PDFs created by newer versions of Acrobat and Office you could run into problems. I've found pdftk and/or ghostscript to be much more reliable at merging/concatenating PDFs than any of the free/open php classes out there.

Sure. You might have to try a few different applications to see if you can find one that you really like. For example, I like pdftk for that kind of stuff, but it's command-line only so you might want to use something like pdfsam which is a GUI application. I've used both and I think they'd both work to do what you want (and more). I'm sure there are applications like that on Windows, I just use Linux 95% of the time so I never found equivalents for everything I use on Linux. Linux also has Adobe Reader and Flash, and these usually work well.

You can try a Live USB to see how it runs on your system (if the graphics are reasonably supported; basically not a black screen). Ubuntu is not a bad choice either, but I just like Mint better for their design. If my hardware couldn't support Ubuntu or Mint I'd probably go for Lubuntu or Xubuntu, the light-weight variants of Ubuntu. Generally the repositories are all the same, all these have the Synaptic GUI package manager available on the system by default. I don't know about Fedora and the like these days because I've been using the Ubuntu-like distributions for so long. But I think for your hardware and experience level the best bet is one of those rather than Fedora.

One other thing I forgot to mention about Mint: It generally requires less configuration than others because they bundle codecs (for DVDs, MP3's, and other patented media formats) and some proprietary drivers for you (e.g., video drivers and wireless drivers), or else they downloaded automatically. It's a small step to save, since it's only a few commands to do it, but I like that to be done automatically. A few other distributions do that too, but Mint is the cleanest looking of them at the moment, I think.

No links for a pdf of the whole book works, so I download every part and joined them using the pdf toolkit.

Sharing through my Dropbox, please be gentle. :P

Edit: I forgot the data files, included in the authors's page

I manipulate PDF and postscript files for a living so I may be able to help.

Did you look at pdftk yet? That should decompress all of the streams, including the fonts.