Question

This was asked in 2008. Hopefully there’s a better answer now.

How can you combine PDFs in ruby?

I’m using the pdf-stamper gem to fill out a form in a PDF. I’d like to take n PDFs, fill out a form in each of them, and save the result as an n-page document.

Can you do this with a native library like prawn? Can you do this with rjb and iText? pdf-stamper is a wrapper on iText.

I’d like to avoid using two libraries (i.e. pdftk and iText), if possible.

Answer 1

I wrote a ruby gem to do this — PDF::Merger. It uses iText. Here’s how you use it:

pdf = PDF::Merger.new
pdf.add_file "foo.pdf"
pdf.add_file "bar.pdf"
pdf.save_as "combined.pdf"