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When I try to merge two .pdf files using Imagemagick
convert pdf1.pdf pdf2.pdf temp.pdf
the resulting temp.pdf file seems to have very low resolution. How can I keep the resolution same as in the source files?
How to merge pdf:s using Imagemagick (resolution problem)
Answers
53
Barns's right, but if pdftk didn't work try ghostscript.
gs -dBATCH -dNOPAUSE -q -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOutputFile=temp.pdf pdf1.pdf pdf2.pdf
20
Imagemagick's convert command is normally used for converting image files from one format to another, and in this case, it is possible that it is actually performing an internal conversion of sorts before outputting the two "images" (PDFs) into a single file.
I would suggest you consider using the PDF Toolkit (pdftk) instead http://www.accesspdf.com/pdftk/
From the examples on the website, this should be as simple as:
pdftk pdf1.pdf pdf2.pdf cat output temp.pdf
Richard
Posted 2009-09-27T12:54:35.287
Reputation: 301
Great ... thank you – Dan Ortega – 2019-06-11T20:26:21.480
Let's upvote this one, pdftk works way better than ghostcript doing this. – Dan Ortega – 2019-06-11T20:32:36.740
I'm running on OS X 10.6.1 and I tried to install pdftk via Macports. It seems that pdftk is deprecated on Mac, the installation would not finish. So, I tried to do this using Imagemagick. – None – 2009-09-27T13:41:29.097
On Ubuntu pdftk was no problem to install from apt, and it did the trick gloriously. I've used ImageMagick to stitch together PDFs before with great success, but because it rasterizes PDFs first (understandably--it doesn't work with vectors) it doesn't look so good for most text documents. But pdftk worked great--thanks for the suggestion. – Iguananaut – 2013-03-03T00:40:33.337
19
If every file you want to merge is in the same folder:
convert -density 150 $(ls -rt *pdf) output.pdf
the argument -density 150 keeps the quality of the merged PDFs.
juda
Posted 2009-09-27T12:54:35.287
Reputation: 191
5A side note on your all PDF syntax, you can omit the sub-ls command: convert -density 150 *.pdf output.pdf – Josh – 2014-07-11T19:47:05.077
'*.pdf' and '$(ls -rt *pdf)' may result in different output. – shantanoo – 2017-08-31T14:48:31.407
8
I always forget how to do this and find this question first when I search.
convert -density 600 file1.pdf file2.pdf -resize 50% new.pdf
The linked example has the density at 144, however, that has never been high enough to not appear pixelated.
Leslie Pajuelo
Posted 2009-09-27T12:54:35.287
Reputation: 81
Sorry, the link is dead now. – Sablefoste – 2015-04-24T16:00:31.890
4
If running linux you can also try poppler which provides pdfunite which concatenates without manipulating the resolution.
haytona
Posted 2009-09-27T12:54:35.287
Reputation: 41
It's an excellent tool, and here's how to do it: https://www.unixblogger.com/how-to-easily-merge-pdf-documents-under-linux/
– Rosamunda – 2019-04-09T02:17:17.4230
I couldn't find any way of joining two pdf files together while keeping the resolution good and the text intact, but I figured out a way to convert it into a high resolution png file.
pdftoppm -f 1 -l 1 -aa yes -aaVector yes -png -r 300 page.pdf > tmp1.png
pdftoppm -f 2 -l 2 -aa yes -aaVector yes -png -r 300 page.pdf > tmp2.png
convert tmp1.png tmp2.png +append -quality 100 page.png
This takes to first two pages of page.pdf and joins them into a side by side high resolution png file.
Changing the last line to
convert tmp1.png tmp2.png +append -quality 100 page.pdf
will result in a pdf document output as I later figured out after messing around with pngtopnm, pnmtops, ps2pdf.
Barry Dmytro
Posted 2009-09-27T12:54:35.287
Reputation: 9
2-1 for suggesting to rasterize a (possible) vector image. That's not the way to go. – Marco – 2012-05-10T11:59:32.107
Worked perfectly, and speedily too - much faster than using ImageMagick with the -density flag. – Brionius – 2014-11-09T22:59:46.630
This should be the correct answer. Not that ImageMagick doesn't work; it works too. But as @Brionius noted, gs is much faster and the quality of the resulting pdf is top notch. – Jagtesh Chadha – 2015-06-15T22:57:51.180
Note that you could use *.pdf instead of the list of pdf1.pdf and pdf2.pdf at the end of this command to convert all pdf in a folder to a single pdf. – Colin D – 2017-11-29T18:28:37.273
I had some problems with the font, some pages lose their font. Is there a way I can choose it? – lesolorzanov – 2019-02-26T14:02:51.023