Combine multi-page PDFs into one PDF with ImageMagick

Question

I am trying to use ImageMagick (6.8.0) to combine several multi-page PDFs into a single PDF. This command:

$ convert multi-page-1.pdf multi-page-2.pdf merged.pdf

Returns merged.pdf, which contains the first page of multi-page-1.pdf and the first page of multi-page-2.pdf.

This command:

$ convert multi-page-1.pdf[2] multi-page-2.pdf[2] merged.pdf

Returns merged.pdf, which contains the third page of multi-page-1.pdf and the third page of multi-page--2.pdf.

I would like to merged.pdf to contain all of the pages of each multi-page pdf. I have so far not found a way of telling the convert command to use a range of pages, although I have tried adding [0-1] and [0,1] at the end of the filenames.

Interestingly, this ghostscript command (which I found via StackOverflow but cannot re-find) does work as I would like it to:

$ gs -q -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOutputFile=merged.pdf multi-page-1.pdf multi-page-2.pdf 

The problem is, the ImageMagick 'convert' command takes urls as inputs and ghostscript does not, and I need my program to take url input rather than file paths.

Is it possible to get the result of the above ghostscript command using ImageMagick?

Answer 1

Why don't you use pdfunite?

Example:

$ pdfunite 1.pdf 2.pdf 3.pdf merged.pdf