[thelist] Concantenating PDF files from Illustrator

[Matt Wenham]

> Does anyone know how to combine PDF files created in Illustrator 9
> into a single PDF file, aside from the obvious answer to use Acrobat 
> :)

I'm assuming you don't have access to the original Illustrator files, or
indeed a copy of Illustrator, otherwise the answer would be to
concatenate the pages in the program itself.

If you don't want to use Acrobat, you could try Ghostscript:

http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost/

This is a Postscript and PDF rendering program, available as freeware.
There is a GUI interface for most operating systems, but the main
rendering engine runs from the command line. You'd want to do something
like:

gs -dNOPAUSE -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOUTPUTFILE=output.pdf -dBATCH file1.pdf
file2.pdf ...

On Windows, replace gs with gswin32c. Ghostscript's font processing may
or may not be suitable for your needs, and the resulting file may be
considerably larger the the sum of the source file sizes. However, it's
free and may be just what you need.

Matt...