Questions on how to combine multiple PDF files into one file often pop up in newsgroups and forums.

There are various solutions available.

• Acrobat Professional 8 has a dedicated ‘Combine files’ menu option in the ‘File’ menu.
• If you are using an older version of Acrobat there are two ways that I know of to merge files
  • Using the ‘Insert pages’ menu option is only practical if you want to merge just a couple of files
  • If you need to merge a large number of files which use consecutive file names simply open the first file, make sure the ‘Pages’ navigation pane is visible and use drag&drop to copy all other files to this area.

  Never forget to perform a SAVE AS in Acrobat after combining files. This makes sure that the new file gets cleaned properly.

• I always use my prepress workflow itself to merge files. I simply create a job that contains the total number of pages, add all PDF files and then do an “‘Export’ out of ApogeeX.
• If a full-blown workflow is slightly above budget but you need to merge loads of PDF files on a regular bases, google around as there are a number of tools on the market to split and merge files.