CODEWITHSUNDEEP
formspdfmerge
Thomas Jordan
Thomas Jordan

Reputation: 21

Merge 2 pdf files and preserve forms

I'd like to merge at least 2 PDF files into one while preserving all the form elements in the original PDFs. The form elements include text fields, radio buttons, check boxes, drop down menus and others. Please have a look at this sample PDF file with forms:

http://foersom.com/net/HowTo/data/OoPdfFormExample.pdf

Now try to merge it with any other arbitrary PDF file.

Can you do it?

EDIT: As for the implementation, I'd ideally prefer a command line solution on a linux plattform using open source tools such as 'ghostscript', or any other tool that you think is appropriate to solve this task.

Of course, everybody is welcome to supply any working solution to this problem, including a coded solution that involves writing a script which makes some API calls to a pdf-processing library. However, I'd suggest to take the path of least resistance first (CMD Solution).

Best Regards

EDIT #2: Well there are indeed several CMD tools that merge PDFs. However, these tools don't seem to, AFAIK, to preserve the forms in the original PDFs! These tools appear to simply just concatenate the printouts of all those PDFs into a single Printout, which is then presented as a single PDF.

Furthermore, If you printout a PDF file with forms into a file, you lose all the forms in it. This clearly not what I'm looking for.

Upvotes: 2

Views: 3531

Answers (1)

Jarred Allen
Jarred Allen

Reputation: 352

I have found success using pdftk, which is an open-source software that runs on linux and can be called from your terminal.

To concatenate multiple pdfs into one (and preserve form-fillable elements), you can use the following command:

pdftk input1.pdf input2.pdf cat output output-file.pdf

Upvotes: 2

Related Questions