Merge PDFs in OS X

I wanted to join a bunch of single page scanned tiffs into a one giant pdf. It's a chapter from a book (Shssssh!) I used Preview to save them as individual pdf files and then thought, how to merge them? I saw this hint for OS X 10.5, but it doesn't work for me on 10.6.

Then I came across another link that suggested I use pdftk (pdf toolkit). It's described here, but I got it using my new MacPorts install.

port search pdftk sudo port install pdftk

The usage is

pdftk file1.pdf file2.pdf cat output outfile.pdf

It worked great. The only problem is the files were named: Scan1.pdf, Scan2.pdf, etc. and when sorted the order is Scan1.pdf, Scan10.pdf, etc., so they were out of order in the merge. I adopted a embarassingly inelegant solution. I shortened the names and then entered this command:

pdftk 0.pdf 1.pdf 2.pdf 3.pdf 4.pdf 5.pdf 6.pdf 7.pdf 8.pdf 9.pdf 10.pdf 11.pdf 12.pdf 13.pdf 14.pdf 15.pdf 16.pdf cat output Ch2.1.pdf

Looks great!