Even my scans are odd

May 16, 2010 9:28 PM

Is there a free or cheap tool that will allow me to combine two pdf files, one of which is a scan of the even numbered pages of a document, and the other being a scan of the odd numbered pages?

I scan a lot of multi-page two sided documents, and the process of scanning each page individually so that they are in the proper order is tedious. I want to be able to feed the document through my document feeder twice, once for the odd pages and once for the even, and combine the two pdfs into one document. Are there any tools out there that will let me do this?

posted by soy_renfield to Computers & Internet (9 answers total)

This doesn't answer your question directly, but I've faced this issue several times. Last week I discovered a setting (input: 2-sided booklet) that would actually scan both sides of the document, don't know how I missed it for a year and a half! Of course, your scanner may not have this option...
posted by prenominal at 9:43 PM on May 16, 2010

If you're on Mac OS X, open the two PDF files with Preview, click on the Sidebar button in the menu bar in each file. You'll see a list of thumbnails representing pages from both PDFs

Drag-and-drop thumbnails from one PDF file's sidebar to the other sidebar, inserting the thumbnail between pages to merge them.

If you want to automate this, use the Automator to create a script.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 9:46 PM on May 16, 2010 [1 favorite]

PDFTK Builder
posted by unliteral at 9:49 PM on May 16, 2010 [2 favorites]

I purchased the A-PDF Merger for work a while back, and I really like it. All their other products that I use (the PDF Splitter and the PDF Info Changer) are lightweight, fast, and very powerful. I recommend them.
posted by gemmy at 9:56 PM on May 16, 2010

Actually, someone already wrote an Automator script for merging PDF files. So you can do batch merging pretty quickly.

Just download the script, open it up, drag in your PDF files and set output options. Pretty straightforward, it looks like.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 9:56 PM on May 16, 2010 [1 favorite]

If you're on a PC you could try pdfhelper. I use it a lot at work and it does the job for me just fine.
posted by mukade at 10:52 PM on May 16, 2010

If you're on a Mac, the appropriately-named "Combine PDFs" makes this a snap.
posted by !Jim at 11:09 PM on May 16, 2010

Best answer: PDFsam (splt and merge) is freeware and multiplatform.
posted by jzed at 4:02 AM on May 17, 2010

PDFill has a free PDF tools for Windows that lets you combine and re-order pages.

For the record, it lets you "Merge, Split, Reorder, Encrypt, Decrypt, Rotate, Crop, Reformat, Header, Footer, Watermark, Images to PDF, PDF to Images, Form Fields Delete/Flatten/List, PostScript to PDF, PDF Information, Scan to PDF, and Create Transparent Image."
posted by SteveInMaine at 6:31 AM on May 17, 2010