Combine multiple PDFs into one

PDFCreator PDFCreator English
1

I am using PDFCreator to produce hundreds of individual documents using a Word Macro. I now need to combine those hundreds of PDFs into one.. can it be done?

I would have made the documents all in Word and then merged them together, except they have graphics in them so they are bout 13 Mb each X 500 documents.. and It would too much for Word to handle.. (I think)

Can be in the macro (add the file being printed to the existing file..or a DOS command line is fine as well..

so any help would be appreciated..

I do see some products out there that can do this

2

I did it in the past the following way:

- Start the PDFCreator application

- Click the icon "Stop Printer" (F2)

- Do your printouts. Each print is listed in the PDFCreator window

- Click right and select "combine all" => you get one pdf file

I've installed the German version here, so might be the menu translations I mentioned above are slightly different in the real application

Hope this helps, ankoe

3

Thanks, but I need it to be totally automatic/ hands free..

 

But your info is good to know.

 

Thanks

4

Ok, there is a better way, if you are still interested, to combine documents.  It's not elegant but its not totally manual.

I shall assume that you have all of your PDFs in one folder (let's call the folder "MyPDFs").

Note: This looks like a lot of steps but this process goes very quickly.

1. Set your printer to "PDFCreator" printer.

2. Go to the folder MyPDFs.  Select up to 15 documents (I do not know if this limitation is on my computer only or if it's a limitation of Windows 7 or what, but the "Print" option on the popup menu disappears when I select more than 15 documents).

3. Right Click on the selected area and choose "Print" on the popup menu.

4. The PDF Creator dialog box will come up (it will only come up this one time).  Press the "Wait/Collect" Button.

5. The PDF Creator dialog box with the "collected" documents will appear.

6. Go back to the MyPDFs folder and repeat steps 2 & 3 with each set of 15 documents until you are done with the last PDF you wish to combine (I was able to do this for 94 PDF documents - about 700 pages combined in all).

7. When the last of your documents have been added. Go to the PDFCreator dialog box with all of the documents you already selected and either press A or the menu "Document->Combine All".

8. When you see one document in the list, then all of the documents are combined.

9. Press P or the menu "Document->Print".  When the print dialog box comes up, change the name of the suggested name, otherwise, you will overwrite the first PDF file you had asked to combine.

10. When the combining is done, Acrobat Reader will pop up with the combined document ready for viewing (it takes a while, when you have a lot of documents).

11. Remember to "unstop the Printer" (either "Printer->Printer Stop" if checked or F2 again if the Printer is in stopped mode).

It looks like a lot of steps but this process goes by very quickly.