The procurement board asked for a single document comparing five subcontractor bids and I have messy PDF proposals fro…
Open Adobe Acrobat.
Go to File > Combine Files.
Click Add Files and select the PDF files you want to merge.
Arrange the files in your desired order by dragging and dropping them within the list.
Click Combine to merge the selected files into a single PDF document.
Save the new combined PDF to your preferred location.
You can preview and reorder files before combining to ensure the final PDF is in the correct sequence.
This runs in the Acrobat app - there is no separate API for this task.
Bookmarks are like a table of contents for your PDF. When you combine files, if you keep 'Preserve Bookmarks' on, each original file becomes a clickable bookmark. This helps you quickly jump to different sections of your long combined document, making it much easier to navigate.
Combining files rarely makes the file size smaller. If your new PDF is too large, you should use Acrobat's 'Optimize PDF' or 'Compress PDF' feature after you have combined the files. This will reduce the size without losing too much quality.
Page numbers restart because each original file might have had its own page numbering starting from '1'. When you combine them, Acrobat just puts them together. To fix this, you need to add continuous page numbers to the combined PDF after you merge it. This will create one smooth sequence of numbers.
In Acrobat, "combining files" and "merging files" usually mean the same thing. Both terms refer to putting multiple separate documents into one single PDF file. The main tool for this is called 'Combine Files'.