How to append two PDFs that have links

pdfpdflatexpdftk

My problem

I have two PDFs which I would like to merge to one PDF. The first one was generated with LaTeX and has links to the chapters, the second one is a GUI-draft with links created with Balsamiq.

How can I append the GUI draft to the LaTeX document with working links?

What I've tried

pdftk LatexDocument.pdf GUI.pdf cat output merged.pdf

worked, but links don't link to the correct pages any longer.

Best Answer

I found the answer to this question over at the TeX stackexchange: https://tex.stackexchange.com/a/8665

i.e. use ghostscript!

$ gs -q -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOutputFile=merged.pdf source1.pdf source2.pdf source3.pdf etc.pdf

I found that unlike other utilities I tried, and the \includedpdf{} command mentioned here, the above gs command preserved my links when merging 4 pdfs, at least for my LuaLaTeX generated file.

Only one of my files contained links, but merging it in multiple times seem to preserve the right order.

Hope that helps!

Related Solutions

How to stamp every page of a pdf except the first one

I can't seem to see anything that allows you to select a range (Seems like a deficiency, you should put in a feature request)

However this seems like a decent workaround, from the man-page:

multistamp < multistamp PDF filename | - | PROMPT > Same as the stamp operation, but applies each page of the stamp PDF to the corresponding page of the input PDF. If the input PDF has more pages than the stamp PDF, then the final stamp page is repeated across these remaining pages in the input PDF.

So create a pdf with a blank first page and on the second page put your stamp. Then run that file using multistamp

Merge two pdf files side by side in command line

You can split File1.pdf and File2.pdf into pages and then combine those tmp files into File1+2.pdf like so:

# Split files, note the naming scheme
pdfseparate File1.pdf temp-%04d-file1.pdf
pdfseparate File2.pdf temp-%04d-file2.pdf

# Combine the final pdf
pdfjam temp-*-*.pdf --nup 2x1 --landscape --outfile File1+2.pdf

# Clean up
rm -f temp-*-*.pdf