Merge PDF

How to merge PDFs

Merging is the job that comes up most often, and usually because somebody asked for one file. A bank wants three months of statements as one attachment, a landlord wants the contract and the two annexes together, a school wants the form and the certificate in a single document. Sending three files when one was asked for is the kind of thing that gets an application sent back.

1. Drop your PDFs on the box at the top, or click it and pick them. Add as many as you like.
2. Check the order. The list is the order of the finished document, first at the top.
3. Drag a file up or down to move it, or use the small arrows on its row if you are on a phone.
4. Press Merge. The new file saves straight to your downloads.

What happens to the pages

Nothing is redrawn. Every page is copied across exactly as it was, with its text still text, its size unchanged and a page that was turned sideways still turned sideways. That matters for a document somebody will print, and it means the merged file is about as big as the files that went into it added together.

Pages of different sizes live together happily in one PDF. If one statement is A4 and one scan is Letter, the merged document simply has pages of both sizes, which is normal and prints fine. If you would rather they matched, that is a job for the printer dialog, not for this tool.

Bookmarks, form fields and attachments from the original files are not carried over. The pages are what is kept. For almost everything people merge - statements, scans, contracts, tickets - there is nothing else there to lose.

How many files, and how big

There is no limit written into this page. The limit is your own computer: the work happens in its memory, so a hundred small PDFs are nothing and two files of five hundred megabytes each may be too much for an old phone. If a very large merge stalls, do it in two halves and then merge the two results.