Acrobat: Combine PDFs into one document

June 19, 2024

by Shawn Wernig

A common solution to the workflow that requires you to keep separate pdfs of your pages, is to combine them all into one at the end of the project. You may use this process to aggregate your publications, or to combine them for email, www.issuu.com (or similar service). This process may auto-compresses your PDFs if you use the default, so it's best to keep your original PDFs.

Below is the Combine Files dialogue, accessed in Acrobat by clicking
File > Combine > Merge Files into Single PDFThe window is empty for now, until we give it some files to combine.
Select and drag your files into the empty dialogue. Each batch you drag into the window will order itself alphabetically, so remember to name your pages 01, 02, 03 instead of 1, 2, 3. Also, each additional batch you drag over will be placed ahead of the currently listed PDFs – the rule here is to assemble your combined pdf list back to front.
Below is our properly ordered pages, the order that these pages appear will be the order the combined pdf will assemble into.
Lastly, remember to select a file size. Be vigilant with your selection, as your PDFs may compress, and become unsuitable for print applications.

Combining multiple documents into a single PDF