Merge PDFs

How to use it#

1. Drop two or more PDFs or images into the box above.
2. Put them in order with the arrows on each row.
3. If you added images, choose the page size and margin they get.
4. The files are merged as you go, so press Download PDF to save the combined document.

Merging does not touch the pages#

A PDF is a collection of page objects with their own fonts, images, and instructions. Merging copies those objects from each document into a new one, with the contents untouched. Nothing is rasterised, re-compressed, or re-flowed, so a page in the merged file is the page that was in the original, byte for byte where it matters.

That is why the operation is quick even on a large document, and why text stays selectable and searchable afterwards: no page is ever turned into a picture.

Adding photos and scans#

A photographed receipt, a signed page, or a scan saved as a picture can go into the same list as your PDFs, and each image becomes one page wherever you put it. That is the whole job when a form wants one PDF and half of what you have is photos.

The PDFs keep their own page sizes. The images get the size you choose: A4 or US Letter, which matches most documents and scales each picture to fit inside the margin, or Fit the image, which makes each page exactly the size of its picture. JPG and PNG files go in as they are, and HEIC, WebP, GIF, and AVIF are converted to JPEG, since a PDF cannot hold them. A portrait phone photo stays upright.

For a stack of pictures with no PDF among them, image to PDF does the same with the page size choices up front.

What comes along and what does not#

Page content, fonts, embedded images, and page sizes all come across. Pages of different sizes stay different sizes, so merging an A4 report with a US Letter appendix gives you a document with both, which is legal and occasionally surprising when printed.

Comments, highlights, and links sit on their pages, so they come across too. What does not survive is what belongs to the document rather than to any page: bookmarks, the table of contents tree, and the title and author. Form fields are split between the two. Each box still shows on its page, but the form that made it fillable stays behind, so fill in a form before merging it rather than after.

Size, and why it does not halve#

A merged file is roughly the sum of its parts. The saving from sharing a font between documents is real but small, because a PDF embeds only the characters it actually uses, so two reports in the same typeface still carry two subsets of it.

There is no compression step here, deliberately. Squeezing a merged document means re-encoding its images, which is a decision about quality that belongs to you rather than to a merge tool doing it quietly. If the result is too big to send, compress PDF does that as a step of its own, and shows you the size before you download.

Protected documents#

A password protected PDF cannot be read without the password, and this tool never asks for one. Such a file is refused with a message rather than silently skipped. So is a file that opens freely but is restricted against printing or copying, because those restrictions are enforced with encryption too.

For a file that asks for a password when you open it, the PDF password remover saves an unlocked copy to merge instead. Restrictions on printing or copying are the author’s to lift: the remover takes them off only with the file’s owner password, and without it the way forward is an unrestricted copy from whoever made the file.