h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I imagine there must be a simple way to do this. I need to merge two parts of a booklet together - the cover and the inside content. So how can it be done?

I use a programme which is called "combine PDFs". It's very easy to use (though I've never tried anything fancy with it!).

Ah, it appears to be just for Mac

With Acrobat, you can open the first document and then choose Document/Insert Pages->From File. That probably won'r work if you're only using Acrobat Reader though.

I know it wastes paper, and I'm also sure there's a better way, but what I'd do is copy the whole lot then scan as one document.

Deb

http://www.adobe.com/uk/epaper/tips/acr5assemble/ makes it sound very simple, but no matter how hard I drag the thumbnail across it just won't go.

Are you using Acrobat or Acrobat Reader?

Reader. So I guess it won't do it. Will have to find something that will, I guess.

Ah... the fact that clients expect me to be able to do this sort of thing is the reason I splashed out and bought the full Acrobat.

Alas my project is drawing to a close so unless I find myself in the way of a lot more of this kind of work, I won't be splashing out just yet.

Text you can select/copy then paste into your word processor - or at least, I've done so.
Other than text might cause a problem though.

I imagine OpenOffice.org would do it. It can open and edit PDFs. And it's free. If you can't get the PDF to open in OO, use http://zamzar.com to convert the PDFs to ODT format, then edit in OO, then export as PDF.

TRiG.

Failing that, ask at http://superuser.com/.

Isn't the point of acrobat documents that we have confidence that they are unedited between the author creating them and us reading them?

I don't know, is it? If you can do this in the full version of Acrobat then it doesn't seem so to me. I thought the main point was that the document would look the same to everyone who opened it, rather than different depending on which word processor (or version of a wp) you are running. I had to create two separate documents as one was made in Publisher and the other in Word, but also because it is better for the printers this way. Now I'd like to merge the cover and the content so it is also a complete document for sending to people in electronic format. It seems I could do this very easily if I had Acrobat.

On mac or linux I've used ghostscript to combine various types of file, including pdf

For windoze there's the pdf-specific, 'pdftk'

http://www.pdflabs.com/tools/pdftk-the-pdf-toolkit/

Used it a long time ago, when I did windoze...

How about opening your Publisher document & inserting the Word document into that. Then you can print it out or create a single PDF document or whatever you need from there.

I found http://foxyutils.com/mergepdf/ worked a treat. Easy to use, nothing to download (except your merged document). Should anyone ever have the need...