As usual Linux has the most elegant and simple solution to a problem that should be easy to perform in Windows as well.
I simply want to combine multiple PDFs into one and not have to “upload” my documents to an online service to do so.
The simplest solution I found was to use Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) which worked a treat.
# How to combine PDF files on Windows 11 using WSL (Ubuntu)
# Install software that includes pdfunite utility
sudo apt install poppler-utils
# Install rename support
sudo apt install rename
# Change to directory where PDF files reside
cd /mnt/c/Users/USERNAME/Downloads/PDFs/
# Copy all needed files to temp directory
cp *.pdf ../TEMP
# Change to the temp directory
cd ../TEMP
# Replace all spaces in filenames with underscores
rename 's/ /_/g' *
# Combine all the PDFs in alphnumeric order
pdfunite $(ls -v *.pdf) combined.pdf
Poppler-utils is a collection of command-line tools used to view, manipulate, and convert PDF documents, built on the Poppler PDF rendering library.
The pdfunite utility included in poppler-utils merges multiple PDF files into one.
Similar outcome can be had in macOS via Homebrew:
brew install poppler