Splitting and merging PDF documents

In this digital age, scanning of documents is an important part of the document handling proces. However, not all document scanners are user friendly – and fail to scan a number of paper documents into a single multipaged Portable Document Format (PDF). Instead, users end up with a number of PDFs. Some might even be multipaged PDFs, that contains one or more pages of garbage. The solution is to split the PDFs and merge them into a single multipaged PDF.

There are a number of online tools, that can do that. However, it can be a security problem to use these as PDFs will have to be transmitted over the internet in unencrypted format. There are also a number of downloadable applications. We recommend PDFsam.

In our test of PDFsam on the Ubuntu 9.10 operating system, we want to split a multipaged PDF into single PDFs and then merge a number of single PDFs into a single PDF.

We install PDFsam from Ubuntu Software Center. When installed, we launch it by clicking Applications, Office and pdfsam.

We open the Split plugin, add our multipaged PDF, choose Burst, choose same destination as source and then run the plugin. The splitted PDFs are written as expected. We open the Merge plugin, add our PDFs, move the pages up or down as necessary, set our destination file and run the plugin. The new multipaged PDF is written as expected.

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