Merging PDFs With PDFBox

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Merging Portable Document Format documents using PDFBox couldn't be simpler. The developer(s) of PDFBox has taken care of all of the hard work and encapsulated it in one class of their Application Programming Interface. All you need to do is use it.

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This past week I needed to extract+merge PDF pages, looked around a bit. From my notes:

(PDF tools, pdftk 2006, toolkit is win/linux cli)

http://www.pdfhacks.com/pdftk/

http://www.softpedia.com/get/Office-tools/PDF/GUIPDFTK.shtml

(using PyPDF)

http://pieceofpy.com/index.php/2009/03/05/concatenating-pdf-...

(2 from softpedia, freeware - Junko OK, 1.3 MB zip)

http://www.softpedia.com/get/Office-tools/PDF/silkodyssey-PD...

http://www.softpedia.com/get/Office-tools/PDF/Junko.shtml

(uses C# free lib http://itextsharp.sourceforge.net/)

(Mac: PDFLab at:)

http://www.iconus.ch/fabien/

This is a Java solution. If you want to create PDFs in PHP, FPDF ( http://www.fpdf.org/ ) works great and has tons of addons. The library FPDI ( http://www.setasign.de/products/pdf-php-solutions/fpdi/ ) uses FPDF and is probably the closest thing to PDFBox in PHP when it comes to working with existing PDFs.

A few years ago I wrote a library using FPDF + FPDI that can overlay barcodes on existing PDFs: http://chir.ag/projects/pdfb/ and it has proven to be a very stable and capable setup. We use this at my work to generate over 10,000 pages of PDFs daily from a tiny Apache server.

And here's a library for Python: http://pybrary.net/pyPdf/

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