[PDF] Merge two pdf files

Task

I recently needed to merge two pdf files, i.e. concatenate one after the other. My PDFsam Visual installation was unexpected broken, and I did not want to spend the time quite then to fix it. So, I tried to use imagemagicks `convert` and acutally it worked but had a price. It converts all to images, i.e. a file from 200 kB size concatenated to a file with 4.8 MB resulted in a file with 13 MB. And the originally non-image parts were blurred a bit. All in all, not acceptable to me.

Solution

Use `qpdf` but watch out. Its use is not so straight forward. The following works.

qpdf --empty --pages file1.pdf file2.pdf [...] -- output.pdf

You cannot shortcut to

qpdf file1.pdf --pages file2.pdf [...] -- output.pdf

With this, file1.pdf will be missing. I do not know the reason for this.