Unstandardized Design

It’s amazing - some things should be easy… and aren’t.  For instance, why did I have to spend 30 minutes figuring out how to combine multiple PDFs into a single file?  If the file extension stands for Portable Document Format, you’d figure it would be easy to deal with.  Well, it’s not.  But here is how to join PDF files in Windows XP.First, download PDFTK via its homepage.  Make sure you get the one for Windows XP!

Now unzip the file that you just downloaded, and put pdftk.exe into c:\windows\system32.  I know, it seems shady, but its not.  We do this so that at the command prompt (yes, the command prompt, that dark and scary place) you can just type “pdftk” and something will happen.  Just trust me on this one.

Finally, open up the command prompt (Start -> Run -> command) and type “pdftk –help”.  This will spit out a bunch of help text, including some great examples.  I put all of the pdf files I wanted to in a folder, and named them 01.pdf, 02.pdf, etc, then I typed “pdftk *.pdf cat output combined.pdf” (minus the quotes, of course).  After a few seconds, I had combined.pdf created!  Huzzah!

Anyone out there got a better method?