

I’ll agree with Lincoln that using a tool like pdftk is much simpler than discovering this trick in Preview on your own.

If you do the latter, you will still only have two files. It’s important to drag the thumbnails onto the other thumbnails and not below the very thin line that appears at the end of the thumbnails. Shazam! You’re done! Simply save the file, and go about your life.
#COMBINE PDFS IN PREVIEW PDF#
Select the thumbnails of the PDF that you want to combine from one file-use Command-A to select them all at once-and then simply drag these thumbnails pages onto the thumbnails of the other PDF. The first thing that you want to do is to open both PDFs that you want to combine in Preview.Ĭlick on the drop-down menu in the upper-left corner and select “Thumbnails” on each PDF.Ī tray will open on the lefthand side of Preview, showing you the individual pages of your PDFs. Even better, combining PDFs takes all of five seconds. There are, as Lincoln points out, many different tools that you can use to combine PDFs, but Preview is especially useful as it is included on every Mac.
#COMBINE PDFS IN PREVIEW HOW TO#
So today I want to show you how to use Apple’s Preview software to combine PDFs in five seconds. Now your pages will appear as thumbnails which you can rearrange by dragging and dropping. Next, drag the PDF file you’d like to combine into the sidebar.

You’ll want to duplicate your file, open it in Preview, and turn on thumbnails. The steps here are similar to adding a page to your PDF.
#COMBINE PDFS IN PREVIEW SERIES#
It doesn’t hurt either that he’s a big fan of the command line (see his invaluable series The ProfHacker Guide to the Command Line).īut not everyone uses the command line as willingly. Whatever the case, Apple Preview makes this a cinch. Lincoln writes that he prefers using the command line for combining PDFs because it saves him time over using the GUI of a program like Adobe Acrobat or Mac’s Preview, where he would have to poke around to find the right method for fixing his problem. In it, he teaches you how to both rotate a PDF and how to combine multiple PDFs with simple commands. Lincoln wrote a helpful post a while back about fixing some common PDF problems with the command-line tool pdftk. Fixing problems with PDFs, then, can be a real pain. If PDFs are so important because the file format is widespread, they can also be frustrating because the format is also inflexible at times. (Fortunately, you can turn your phone into a scanner.) The prevalence of PDF in modern life is one of the reasons we’ve written so often about the subject at ProfHacker. And no conference travel would complete without scanning receipts into PDF form and submitting them. We annotate these PDF assignments or the grant applications that we’re working on with colleagues. We collect assignments from our students as PDFs because a paperless classroom is a disease-free classroom. We read journal articles as PDFs because they come that way from databases. Academics tend to work with a lot of PDFs.
