If you want a no muss, no fuss way of joining two or more PDFs together,
look no further than joinPDF. It's a simple but elegant little program. In fact, simplicity informs every aspect of joinPDF.
How so? It consists of a script (named joinPDF) and a compiled Java file. To run it, you only need to specify the name of the output
file and the files that you want to combine at the command line. To use joinPDF you type something like this:
joinpdf myFile.pdf file1.pdf file2pdf ...
Depending on how many PDFs you're combining and their sizes, joinPDF only
takes a few seconds to merge them. And it compresses the output file. While
writing this article, I used with joinPDF to combine various combinations of
files of various sizes. Each time, the resulting PDF was several kilobytes to
several tens of kilobytes smaller than the total sizes of the source
files.
The biggest advantage of joinPDF is its simplicity. There are no options
to remember. As well, joinPDF is written in Java -- to use it, you need
version 1.4 of the Java Runtime Environment installed. It runs on Linux, or any other operating system that supports Java.
On the downside, joinPDF cannot join PDFs if one or more of them is encrypted. As well, some users might find joinPDF's simplicity to be a detriment. If you want options, joinPDF isn't for you. In order to use joinPDF out of the box, you have to copy the Java file to the /usr/lib directory -- that's where the joinPDF script expects to find it. If you want to put the Java files somewhere else, like the /usr/local/bin directory, you need to edit the joinPDF script to point to that directory.