Combining PDFs

Sometimes one of the most efficient ways of getting your PDF put together is to use the Combine Files dialog box in Adobe Acrobat. Adobe understands that and they make it very visible upfront so you can see right here on the splash screen, Combine Files into PDF is available. Or if you already have a PDF opened, you can't see this, under the Create menu, you can go to Combine Files into a Single PDF. So that's how you get to the Combine command. Let's choose it from either place, and you get a big dialog box.

Combining file just means exactly what it says. Basically, it's kind of like inserting a whole bunch of files into each other to make one monster PDF. So if you watched the inserting video, I would say, combining files is kind of like the granddaddy of inserting. Combine files is actually much more powerful and flexible than inserting. If you just need to quickly add a couple of more PDFs or part of a web page into an existing PDF, probably the Insert command is better, but if you have whole bunch of different files that you want to combine into one PDF, this is the way to go.

So, first, take a look at the top. The choices are, do you want to make one Single PDF like I just said, or do you want to make a PDF Portfolio, which is a very cool feature available in Acrobat 9 and 10 and visible to Reader users who are using Reader 9 and 10. I talk about Adobe's PDF Portfolio in entire chapter in this title. Right now we just want to make a Single PDF. You can drag and drop files if you want to rearrange your windows, so you can see Windows Explorer, or the Mac Finder, next to this. You can just drag and drop them right into here, which is pretty cool.

But what I want to do here is I am just going to use the Add Files dropdown menu. So you can add individual files or you can add entire folders, like I'll come here and say, Add a Folder, and then it says, where is the folder that you want to add and I know that on my Desktop, in Chapter_06 Exercise Files I have something called Combining with a folder that is called Logos. I want to add that. So it extracts the contents of that folder and because some of the stuff was created on a Mac, it's bringing in some of these invisible files. So I could select this and choose Remove.

I don't need that weird little file, that resource work. Let's add some additional files. Let's say individual files. I want to bring in sec6 PDF. I am going to hold down the Ctrl key, I want to bring in this TIF file, add those. You could attach a scanner and add some pages that you scan from a PDF, you can add a web page, let's go ahead and do that. We don't want to add Adobe.com, but we will add the homepage for twotreesolive.com.

So it's going to suck that in as well. You can also add Email messages. This will go ahead and start up Outlook and you can drag and drop individual Email messages onto this, or a folder, like a folder of certain Email messages that you have set up in Outlook. It's going to combine these into a single PDF and it gives you some kind of general control over the file size. So if you want to make this combined PDF as small as possible while it is combining and converting these files to PDF format, it will try to optimize them as small as possible.

If you really don't care about the file size, you just want to keep the highest quality of images and text as much as possible, then keep it up here, larger file size. It uses the high quality Adobe PDF settings as you see. The default is mama bear right there in the middle. So now we have these things and I might want to say, well, actually I want the Olive tree to be the first one. So I am going to select this and move it up. So I want that to be the first page of the PDF, and then I would like the web page to be the second page of the PDF, and I want the bread logo to be the very last thing.

So you could rearrange them in this way. Then if you go to Options, you have a few options, not too many. The main thing is that you might want to turn on Always add bookmarks to the PDF. So it can add a bookmark whenever a new document that it combined starts, which is kind of neat. And if an error occurs while it's combining, because you can add hundreds of files to this dialog box, and you want it to keep on going and then just report on the errors at the end, then keep that turned on. This is what I usually do. This just has to do if you are creating a portfolio, if you are using the Portfolio option, which we are not, so we can just ignore that.

So that's the Combine Files. It's very powerful and flexible. Let's go ahead and make it so, Combine the Files. It is going to the web site - Before I could even explain what it did, it finished. So we have a six page PDF starting with the picture. Let's look at our little Page Thumbnails panel. There is the web page that it captured. There is the logo. Here is the section from the employee manual. There is another logo and that's it. That is the very powerful, very flexible Combine Files into Single PDF dialog box.

Keep that in mind next time you have to pull together a whole bunch of different files and make a single PDF out of them.