wkhtmltopdf: Is it possible to merge PDF files?

Question

Using this library wkhtmltopdf, is it possible to merge 2 pdf files. I need to generate a report and merge the report with some attached documents.

Generation of report is done, converting from HTML to PDF. But I need to merge the resulting PDF with some other PDFs

Intubate

You can use PDFtk which has all kinds of options for merging PDFs. – Alarcon

Answer 1

wkhtmltopdf doesn't provide support for merging PDF's. You can accomplish this using GhostScript. It's a pretty powerful tool and frequently used by Linux users.

You can use the following command:

gs -dBATCH -dNOPAUSE -q -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOutputFile=out.pdf in1.pdf in2.pdf

You can try these links for further reading:

• GhostScript
• Merge PDF's using Ghostscript (Windows)

In case you want it for Linux refer

• Merge PDF's using Ghostscript (Linux)

EDIT: As stated by @nenotelp there are other tools available as well. The part that @nentelp mentioned is regarding the handling of bookmarks which is better with iText or iTextSharp. If this is your requirement you can certainly opt for other tools.

P.S. - Google Ghostscript. You will find tons of references.

Hargeisa

This is true, BUT I would highly recommend iText or iTextSharp for the merge - wkhtmltopdf bookmarks are not your dads bookmarks, they don't play well with GhostScript. They don't play well with pdftk either. I know that you are about tho say something like "Ghostscript with pdfmark can easily deal with that" - it should, but it won't :P. – Granado

Also see https://mcmap.net/q/400529/-merge-pdf-39-s-with-pdftk-with-bookmarks with an awesome answer regarding this topic. When I tested it, it did not work with wkhtmltopdf bookmarks. Also the TOC get screwed, but there's nothing you can do about that - wkhtmltopdf TOC anchors are not unique ARGFHH! I have complained about this into the bug system but Antialize is too busy and nobody else has stepped up yet because of the QT mess. – Granado

the problem with gs is sometimes thrown undefinedfilename error, – Osrock

Answer 2

You can combine multiple html files to one output pdf file with this library. For e.g if u have:

my-html-file-nr-1.html
my-html-file-nr-2.html
....
my-html-file-nr-n.html

You can simply:

wkhtmltopdf my-html-file-nr-* output.pdf

Infusible

He specifically asked about merging two PDFs. – Decretal

if i create 1 pdf form 2 html-s do you know if this will restart the page count? so on the footer html1 shows the page count, then does the html2 restart the page count? – Machute