A couple of days ago I had to create a single PDF out of a bunch of single paged PDF documents. There are a couple of of tools out there like pdftk which can do the job, but a graphical interface helps a lot with this task. While search the net for a solution I found PDF-Shuffler which is perfect for this job.

The program is quite new and needs still some attention, but it’s main function is good enough to work with…

PDF-Shuffler isn’t yet included into the package repositories of Debian or Ubuntu, so you have to install it by hand. To do this get the source of the program first from sourceforge.net and save the archive e.g. onto you desktop.

After this start a terminal, extract the archive, install the necessary dependencies und use checkinstall create a .deb package which you can easily remove via the package management if you don’t like PDF-Shuffler. This should work on most Ubuntu or Debian systems…

$ cd ~/Desktop
$ tar -xzf pdfshuffler*.tar.gz
$ cd pdfshuffler*
$ sudo apt-get install python-poppler python-pypdf checkinstall
$ sudo checkinstall python setup.py install

After this you can start the program via Applications -> Office -> PDF-Shuffler” and start rearranging documents. Load a .pdf-file and simply drag&drop the pages into the right order. Import a second .pdf-file to combine PDFs together and finally export the result to a new PDF. When you have to import a couple of PDFs, just select them inside Nautilus and drag&drop them into PDF-Shuffler.