Monday, September 10, 2012

Concatenating PDF files using Windows Shell Add-ons

I was tasked with finding a good utility that would allow me to highlight a number of PDF files in the Windows Explorer, and then right-click to concatenate (combine) the files together to form one large PDF file.

PDFTk, the PDF toolkit, does this very well from the command line; however, the prospect of using a command-line tool is daunting to the average user.

I found a FANTASTIC tool called pdftk4all. It functions as a very easy-to-use front end to pdftk. Plus, it integrates a plethora of common features into a series of logical, easy-to-use contextual menus. As a programmer, one of the best features of this program is that its source code includes a very simple example of how to create cascading contextual menus for the Windows Explorer shell.

As best I can tell, there is truly no reason to purchase Adobe Acrobat.

Thank you to Maarten Veerman for PDFTK4ALL!

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