Something you have to do from time to time is assemble a PDF out of pages from other PDFs or images. I had to do this today. I was writing a report in Open Office. I exported the report to PDF to send it but then wanted to attach a few appendices to that PDF file so I would only have to email one file rather than a collection of files. TBH I expected to be able to do this kind of thing very easily with Preview by just dragging and dropping things around but no, not happening. So, off to Google I went and I found a simply excellent freeware App that lets you do this in a really simple and easy way.

[tags]OS X, PDF, Freeware[/tags]

The App I found is PDFLab and it’s completely free. You can get it from www.iconus.ch/fabien/pdflab/. It doesn’t just let you join PDFs though, it also lets you split them and compose your own PDFs by taking other PDFs, pages from other PDFs, images, or blank pages, and then re-organising the lot until you’re happy with the resulting document. You can even repeat pages or documents as often as you want and rotate them by 90 degrees. When you’re happy with the way you have your document laid out you just click a button and out pops your PDF. This is a proper Mac App, drag and drop all the way. You can drag stuff around within the App and also drag and drop files in from the Finder.

I don’t have a single bad thing to say about this App. It does everything I want and more and it does it well and in an easy to use way, what more can one ask for form an App! Anyhow, below is a screen shot to give you an idea how it works.

PDFLab Screen Shot

Update (06 May 2008): As Joe has kindly pointed out in the comments the link in the article no longer works and you should use this one instead. It should also be noted that if you use OS X 10.5 Leopard you can now do much of this straight from within Preview. If you open up the drawer you can drag and drop pages around within a single file and even drag-and-drop them from one file to another, hence composing your own PDF.