Merge PDF Files with Interleaving Pages Order – How to Guide

pdfprinting

I've got a double-side-printed multipage document to scan with a linear bulk scanner. So, as the result I get 2 PDF files: one containing all odd pages and the second containing all even pages. I need to merge them the natural way:

1. <- 1.1. (odd.pdf page 1 to result.pdf page 1)
2. <- 2.1. (even.pdf page 1 to result.pdf page 2)
3. <- 1.2. (odd.pdf page 2 to result.pdf page 3)
4. <- 2.2. (even.pdf page 2 to result.pdf page 4)

etc.

Best Answer

See the pdfseparate and pdfunite commands from poppler-utils. The first to separate the pages from each document into individual files, and the second to merge them in the order you want in a new document.

Also note that since scanners give you raster images anyway (which some like yours can concatenate into a PDF files), maybe you can configure it to output images (png, tiff...) instead, and do the concatenation into a PDF yourself with ImageMagick.

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