Without diving deep into the topic, PDF merge on Mac seems easy. Whether you’re using Mojave and Catalina or older macOS versions, Preview covers the feature on most of them. In the end, you can also use web services for online merging. Well, you wouldn’t be here if it were that easy, right?
Combine PDFs into one
How to Merge PDF Files online, free. Select the PDF files or other documents you wish to combine with our PDF merger. Our online PDF joiner will merge your PDF files in just seconds. After combining your PDFs, select and download your merged PDFs to your computer. Our free PDF converter deletes any remaining files on our servers. PDF Merge Split for Mac is a free Mac application to combine and cut PDF. Just follow the next steps. Run PDF Merge Split for Mac and click 'Merge' tab if you want to combine PDF files into one. Drag and drop PDF files. Ajust the order by dragging each file. Enter the page range you want to combine.
Get a set of top apps to merge PDF files, add and rearrange PDF pages on your Mac. Best utilities in one pack, give it a go!
To combine PDF files while saving your edits might be a huge problem. Preview doesn’t cover flattening and makes your system slow down if you merge large files. These and other issues might force you to search for better options. Let’s explore all the ways to combine PDFs on Mac to cover your particular scenario.
Preview is Apple’s native image and PDF viewer built for macOS. The app is primarily used to fill out PDF forms, add signatures as well as combine PDF files or specific pages across PDFs. Here’s the basic guide on how to use Preview for PDF management.
To merge PDFs in Preview:
To insert specific pages into PDFs:
Once you combine PDF files, you can continue editing to reach your desired output:
That’s basically the whole toolkit Preview covers in terms of PDF merge. Unfortunately, even these features can be pretty limited in some situations:
The alternatives are easy to find. And if you’re working with PDFs on a regular basis — expecially large files and extensive edits — you should probably get a reliable third-party PDF editor.
So we’ve seen the shortcomings. No judgment, Preview is still a stunning tool to apply basic changes. If all you need is to insert a page from another PDF or merge small files, Apple’s native utility won’t let you down. But if your document contains any scripts, annotations, or custom changes, you will have trouble saving it. This is where PDFpen comes to rescue.
PDFpen is a full-featured PDF editor with OCR support. Its biggest superpower is a rich editing toolkit enabling you to redact sensitive info in PDFs, add signatures, attach notes and comments, etc. Best of all, PDFpen lets you flatten a PDF and merge it with other PDFs, preserving all the changes you’ve made. Here’s a detailed guide.
To merge multiple files with PDFpen:
Another way to insert PDF 1 into PDF 2 is to open one of the files, then go to the menu bar and click on File > Insert. PDF 2 will appear after the current page in PDF 1.
To add blank pages or pages from another PDF:
If you want to flatten a PDF preserving the annotations you’ve added, you can do it via PDFpen’s Print feature: File > Print > PDF > Save as PDF. The saved document will contain all the annotations. Another option is to save your PDF as a .TIFF file, which will basically turn PDF pages into large images.
Prizmo is a perfect tool for merging physical pages and transforming them into a searchable PDF document. Let’s say you have printed pages of your favorite short stories, covered with dust. Or, you’re collecting paper receipts and it would really help if you could have them in one digital document. For those purposes, nothing really matches the capabilities of Prizmo.
Here’s how you combine PDFs into one using Prizmo:
That’s it, no complications. The most exciting part of the Prizmo experience is whatever happens between you scan your files and run PDF merge:
This editing toolkit gives you the freedom of not only merging PDFs but also changing the look of texts and images on PDFs. Once you apply the changes, you can export merged files as searchable PDFs as well as enable access across devices via iCloud sync.
PDFpen and Prizmo both make a solid alternative to Apple’s Preview. However, you’ll probably use them for different purposes: PDFpen — for flattening PDFs, and Prizmo — for image OCR and searchable PDF export. The great news is thatt is not a problem at all. Both apps are a part of Setapp subscription, which means you can use them + 170 other Mac uilities for $9.99 per month. By the way, PDFpen and Prizmo are not the only Setapp citizens that specialize in PDFs. You’ll also have the chance to experiment with PDF Search and PDF Squeezer.
Hopefully, this article helped you solve your “how to combine PDF files Mac” problem, beautifully. And remember, you can change just about anything if you own the right tools — even PDFs!
Meantime, prepare for all the awesome things you can do with Setapp.
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Oct 15,2019 • Filed to: Mac Tutorials
'Have multiple PDF files and need to merge the files into 1 PDF?'
No worry! Below we will share top 10 best PDF merger for Mac and Windows. PDFelement Pro tops the list.
PDFelement Pro provides you with multiple PDF solutions. This PDF merger for Mac (macOS 10.15 Catalina) allows you to combine PDF files on Mac with just a few clicks. It also allows you to edit PDF documents with maximum ease. You can encrypt all your PDFs by setting up private passwords. Furthermore, converting, creating, splitting and compressing PDF are fully supported.
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PDFSam PDF Split and Merge is a popular piece of free PDF merger for PDF splitting and merging, for multiple operating systems, including Mac OS X. The essence of PDFSam is to allow users to select multiple PDF files, which can be merged or split. Merging and splitting is done with several settings, and you will be able to personalize the way these operations are done. It processes PDF documents really fast! It even allows you to compose PDFs visually.
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With PDF Studio, you have various operations to perform on PDF documents. You can add pencil annotations, highlight text, include prefabricated rubber stamps, add email addresses or URLs, support JavaScript PDF forms, scan your documents to PDF format, encrypt your documents, navigate through your files easily and more!
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jPdf Tweak is another free PDF merger for Mac that allows multiple options to merge PDF files. Now you can apply password protection, rotate any pages, merge documents into one, apply special watermarks on your PDFs, split pages, edit author info and much more. The user interface allows many settings, from which you can choose the ones you need.
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This free Mac PDF merge software was created with a sole purpose: to allow users to merge multiple PDF documents into a single document. While this program won't bring you anything more than the pure functionality to merge files, it is very simple to use, efficient and allows moving pages before you merge. More than the above mentioned you will have the output in a matter of few seconds. One potentially harmful aspect though is that it automatically overwrites files, so be careful not to lose your original PDF files by overwriting them with the merged ones!
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Product | Price | Merge/combine PDF files | Merge other file formats to PDF | Split PDF | Compress PDF | Edit PDF |
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PDFelement Pro | $99.95 | |||||
PDFSam | Free | --- | --- | --- | ||
PDF Studio | $89 (Standard) or $129 (Pro) | --- | Only permissions, passwords, hyperlinks | |||
jPdf Tweak | Free | -- | --- | --- | ||
PDFMergeX | Free | --- | --- | --- | --- |
PDFelement Pro Windows version is a powerful PDF merger that enables you to import multiple PDF files or other format files and then combine them into one PDF. And it comes with many built-in PDF edit tools allowing you to edit texts, images, links, and other elements in PDF. You can even encrypt, annotate, watermark, convert, and create PDF docuemnts without any fuss.
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This is a PDF merger for Windows meant to be accessed by developers using .NET. it can be used from C# .NET or Visual Basic .NET, enabling coders to simply use the PDF development kit in their applications to merge PDFs into one. The code to allow merging is very simple. The SDK, which is the Foxit PDF Merger SKD, allows capabilities to generate and/or modify PDF documents.
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The idea is that you need to buy this PDF combiner, or else the output merged PDFs will all be watermarked. The good thing to enjoy about A-PDF Merger is that it allows both office to PDF and images to PDF. It also comes with custom merging, allowing page order changes, duplication and more! The user interface is intuitive, allows drag and drop and provides output quickly.
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qvPDF is not a PDF combiner to be known by the majority of computer users, but it's definitely worth trying. It is a virtual printer driver, resulting in PDFs as output. To output PDF it won't need other software, so you can now literally save any files to PDF. It allows a wide variety of PDF operations, including merging, metadata editing, and much more!
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With PDFill Free PDF merge tool, you literally have a variety of free tools to use with any number of PDF files. It is freeware, and you can merge, watermark, split, reorder PDF documents and handle many more operations. It depends on a single free software, third-party, called GhostScript.
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PDF Mergers | Price | Merge/combine PDF files | Merge other file formats to PDF | Split PDF | Compress PDF | Edit PDF |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
PDFelement Pro | $99.95 | |||||
Foxit PDF Merger | $499 or more | --- | --- | --- | ||
A-PDF Merger | $35 or FREE | --- | --- | --- | ||
qvPDF | Free | -- | --- | --- | --- | |
PDFill Free PDF Tools windows | Free | --- | --- | --- |