[MiKTeX] Merging pdf files

[Dr F. J. W. <F.J...@qm...>]

From: "Dr Francis J. Wright" <F.J...@qm...>
To: <mik...@li...>
Sent: Thursday, February 13, 2003 2:47 PM
Subject: Re: [MiKTeX] pstopdf viz dvitopdf


> PS: Does anyone know of a (preferably free) utility or way of using
> Ghostscript that can merge pdf files without mangling them.

I can now answer my own question.  The solution I was looking for, which
works extremely well, was provided by my colleague Steve Schwartz and uses
Ghostscript.  I had a set of files named MA_1.pdf up to MA_16.pdf that I
wanted to merge in numerical order into the file MA.pdf.  I used the Cygwin
bash shell, changed to the directory containing the files, and executed this
command:

$
/e/Ghostscript/gs8.00/bin/gswin32c -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -dNOPAUSE -dQUIET -dBAT
CH -sOutputFile=MA.pdf MA_?.pdf MA_??.pdf

The files MA_*.pdf had a total size of about 33Mb but MA.pdf is only 6.5Mb.
It really does contain all the other files and is equally readable, i.e. it
renders well on screen at various scales. (I have no idea how MA_*.pdf were
produced!)  It should be possible to use a Microsoft shell, but for this
task I could not see a good way to get the list of input files in the right
order.

Francis