My name’s Colin Ainscough and I am a designer based in Lancashire, England. I create artwork for all types of projects, from print right through to web site development. I am not currently accepting new projects; however, if you like what I do and would like to know more then contact me here. In the meantime, here is my site complete with portfolio and if you are really bored, my blog is here to.

Combining PDFs without Adobe Acrobat

As a fully employed digital producer by-day and a freelance designer the rest of the time I hit software problems regularly. At one job I have the full CS2 suite and in my freelance life I have a cobbled collection of premium, cheap and free applications that make it possible to do my job.

One of the main trouble points I hit is the handling of PDFs; yes you’ve guessed it, at my main employment I have a copy of Adobe Acrobat Pro but in freelance-land I don’t, and nor do I want to fork out the £500+ they are asking for it.

So over time I have adapted my practices to fit with the jobs I manage. The main issues I come across are…

• Batch outputting PDFs as single files.
• Combining separate PDFs
• Resampling PDFs to lower file sizes

I have crude solutions to the batch output and re-sampling issues, but I won’t waste your time with these. Instead I wanted to share my method or combining separate PDFs into one document easily. Now be warned this is an Apple Mac solution so I must apologise to all PC users who have stumbled across this article. However, I will promise to update this soon with a PC solution as well.

So here is how!

For this example I have three PDF files, each outputted from InDesign and each containing a set of pages (You could do this with single document PDFs as well).

Open one of the documents in the standard OSX Preview app. Then select ‘view’ and then ‘Thumbnails’ which will display a side panel with all the current pages displayed.

You can now drag your additional PDF files from the desktop to the thumbnails panel and drop them in the appropriate order. Preview will then import the additional pages to create one complete document.

Follow this process for all PDFs until they are all imported.

Finally save the document and voila, you are done.

I hope you found this useful; and if you have any other PDF tips or solutions then please let me know by commenting on this article.