Merge multiple PDFs using Ghostscript

merge-pdf-ghostscript.md

A simple Ghostscript command to merge two PDFs in a single file is shown below:

gs -dNOPAUSE -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOUTPUTFILE=combine.pdf -dBATCH 1.pdf 2.pdf

Install Ghostscript:

Type the command sudo apt-get install ghostscript to download and install the ghostscript package and all of the packages it depends on.

Many thanks! You saved my day :) 👍

many thx

Thank you

thx!

Thanks!

I added this to a function in my .zshrc (or .bash_profile for *nix) for easier use.

pdfcombine ()
{
   gs -q -dNOPAUSE -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOUTPUTFILE=${1%.*}___${2%.*}.pdf -dBATCH $1 $2
}

Then you can just run

pdfcombine file1.pdf file2.pdf

Which will output the combined pdfs to a file called file1___file2.pdf

Inspired by this gist which is using ghostscript to compress a pdf.

Works perfectly on Cygwin @Windows 10 64 bit . Thanks !

Is there a way to merge them together to make a double spread pdf? something like this, but with ghostscript?

didn't work for me. silly errors in the output that i did not understand.

but pdftk free did work for me => https://www.pdflabs.com/tools/pdftk-the-pdf-toolkit/
beautifully simple and fast command line. might help someone else

pdftk.exe input_*.pdf output combined.pdf

Thanks

I slightly modified @oliverlambson 's function to accept n arguments, where the first argument is the name of the resulting pdf.
pdfcombine () { gs -q -dNOPAUSE -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOUTPUTFILE=${1%.*}.pdf -dBATCH ${@:2} }

Added a check. Found it handy to have in .zshrc.
Usage will be eg. pdfmerge mergerd.pdf in1.pdf in2.pdf

function pdfmerge() {
  if [[ $# -lt 2 ]]; then
    echo "usage: $0 <out.pdf> <in1.pdf> <in2.pdf> ... <inn.pdf>" >&2
    return 1
  fi
  gs -dBATCH -dNOPAUSE -q -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -dPDFSETTINGS=/prepress -sOutputFile=$@ ; 
}

Any downside to using -o?

Auto adds the -dBATCH and -dNOPAUSE ... Found in the docs here

gs -o combine.pdf -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -dPDFSETTINGS=/prepress 1.pdf 2.pdf

thank you!

This could not be easier ! Thank you very much !

thanks!

Thanks!