PDFMergeX Makes Combining PDFs Simple.

For the Joe Average PDF user, the Mac is a godsend. I tried many solutions on PCs for creating PDFs as cheaply as possible; however, none were satisfying. Imagine my delight when I switched and discovered it was built right into OS X. Woohoo! Now, I know that real PDF creators aren’t fans of OS X’s PDF creation, but for us average sorts, it’s perfect.

Well, almost.

One thing it lacks is a way to combine PDFs. One time you need that is for MS Word’s annoying habit of creating multiple PDFs when you print-to-PDF for a document with sections. Another time you might want to merge PDFs is when you print multiple pages from the web on the same topic, or an online manual that’s split into sections.

There’s nothing better than a simple solution, and Daniele Margutti provides it. A utility he wrote in a day, PDFMergeX has been my right hand man of PDF merging for some time now. In fact, I keep an icon for it in my Finder toolbar.

According to his blog, “Daniele Margutti studies Computer Science in Rome. During his free time he loves to make software for the Mac OS.”

PDFMergeX in action
PDFMergeX is very easy to use, which is why I like it so much.

Using the “Add PDFs…” button, you select the PDFs you want to merge. It’s then a simple case of pressing the “Move Up” and “Move Down” buttons to locate each PDF where you want it in the final PDF.

To relocate pages within a PDF, double click on the PDF in PDFMergeX and edit pages’ locations.

When you’re happy with your PDF, hit the “Combine” button and your newly merged PDF will be saved to the folder of your choice.

Shortcomings
PDFMergeX is a little rough around the edges, and does have a few things it needs to improve upon:
-  It’s not quite finished, with some menu items having default names (like Quit NewApplication) and some buttons have not been localized for English—although it’s quite obvious what they do.
- It is an inconvenience that PDFMergeX does not currently support drag and drop from the Finder. Adding that would speed up the process a little.
- Drag and drop to rearrange pages and PDFs would also be a useful feature.
- For some reason, the list window is cleared after creating the PDF. As a precaution (given that we do like to change our minds), it would be nice if this list was retained after combining, and even savable for later recreation of the same PDF.
- With no help system, I couldn’t get the hang of managing pages within each PDF.

Overall
Despite these shortcomings, PDFMergeX is all I need for merging PDFs. There are some commercial solutions out there, which probably make your PDF do cartwheels with its eyes closed. But I just wanted to merge PDFs and PDFMergeX is a good solution. 7/10

Like a lot of developers, Daniele uses a donaware model. So if you find PDFMergeX useful and want to encourage him to tidy it up and keep improving it, send him some cash and ideas for its enhancement.