partofus.org Mac-Tests > 2008 > October

Today I had to combine twi PDF files into one. A quick search on MacUpdate revealed the following tools:

• joinpdf (command line tool, different GUIs included in the package) and Join PDFs (Apple Script GUI):
  because of the command line interface it could also be used in scripts, can merge and split files, but also extract pages from PDFs, Java
• PDFLab:
  I couldn’t get it to run properly on OS X Leopard, the application crashed immediately after adding a PDF file, last update January 2007
• PDFsam (PDF Split and Merge)
  Java, GUI not in OS X stile, but functional, output format can be choosen from PDF version 1.5 (Acrobat 5) up to 1.7 (Acrobat
• Combine PDFs
  uses only OS X provided CoreGraphics libraries, no Java involved, typical Mac GUI, can only merge but not split PDFs

I recomend to use Combine PDFs if you only want to quickly merge files as it’s the easiest one of the above to use (drag & drop), if you also want to split documents you should use PDFsam.