FileForge

Merge PDF files

Put a cover letter in front of a report, or gather a year of statements into one file to send. The pages are copied across whole, not redrawn.

Drop files here

or click to browse — you can select several at once

How to use it

  1. Drop every PDF you want to join onto the box below.
  2. Use the arrows in the file list to put them in the right order.
  3. Press Process files and download merged.pdf.

Nothing is re-encoded

Each page is copied into the new document exactly as it was stored, so text stays selectable and searchable, vector drawings stay sharp at any zoom, and photographs are not compressed a second time. The result is roughly the size of the inputs added together. That is the honest outcome of joining files rather than reprocessing them, and if the total is too large to email, compress the merged file afterwards.

The order is the whole job

A file picker does not hand files back in the order you clicked them. Most browsers pass them in whatever order the operating system lists the folder, which is usually alphabetical, so a set named scan1, scan2 and scan10 arrives in the wrong sequence. That is why the queue is shown as a list you can rearrange with the up and down arrows before anything is written, and why those arrows work from the keyboard.

What does not travel with the pages

Anything the pages carry themselves comes along: their content, their size and their rotation. Anything that belongs to the document as a whole does not, because the merged file is a new document. Bookmarks and the outline pane, filled-in form values and file attachments are the ones people notice. If a document is valuable mainly for its form data, keep the original alongside the merged copy.

Questions

Does merging reduce the quality of my PDFs?

No. Pages are copied rather than re-rendered, so nothing is compressed again and nothing looks softer than it did before.

Why did my files load in the wrong order?

Browsers return a multiple selection in the folder order, not the order you clicked. Rearrange the list with the arrow buttons before you press Process files.

Can I merge a password-protected PDF?

No. An encrypted document cannot be opened without its password, so it reports an error. Remove the protection in the program that made it, then merge.

Related tools