One PDF from many files
Add PDFs, photos, scans and office documents to the list, put them in the order you want and click Merge. You get a single PDF that follows the list from top to bottom, and a table of how many pages each file gave.
- Order: drag a file up or down, or use its arrow buttons, which also work with the keyboard. Sort by name puts the list in file-name order, handy for numbered scans and photos.
- Bookmarks: every file gets a bookmark named after it, so a PDF reader's side panel shows where each one starts. Turn this off under the options if you don't want them.
- Some pages only: under More options, give the file's number in the list and the pages to
take, for example
1: 1-3; 3: 2-. Files you don't name are taken whole.
What happens to each kind of file
| File | In the merged PDF |
|---|---|
| Its pages as they are: text stays selectable, with fonts, pictures, form fields and links to web pages | |
| JPEG | One page per photo; the JPEG data is copied in without being compressed again |
| PNG, WebP, TIFF, BMP, GIF | One page per picture, stored without loss (every page of a multi-page TIFF, the first frame of a GIF) |
| HEIC, HEIF, AVIF | One page per photo, turned upright |
| Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OpenDocument, RTF, text | Laid out by LibreOffice the way they would print |
Photos come out upright when the camera recorded how the phone was held. Transparent areas of a picture become white paper.
Page size for pictures
With Same as the picture, a scan that records its resolution (such as 300 dpi) comes out at its real paper size, and a photo or screenshot gets a page about the size of a sheet of A4. With A4 or US Letter, every picture is centred on a page of that size, turned to landscape when the picture is wide, and made smaller to fit but never larger. The optional 1 cm margin leaves white space around each picture. PDF pages and documents always keep their own size.
Damaged and protected files
A PDF with a damaged index (for example after a failed download) is repaired while it is read, and the notes say so, so you can check its pages. Files that can't be used are left out, the notes say why, and the rest are still merged. PDFs that need a password to open, or whose author protected them against changes, are left out as well: open them in a PDF program with the password, remove the protection and add the unprotected copy.
What is not kept
The bookmarks and accessibility tags of the original PDFs are not carried over, and links that jump to another page inside a PDF may stop working. Up to 100 files and 5,000 pages can be merged in one go.