How to create large PDF files (10MB, 50MB, 100MB, 200MB, 500MB, 1GB, etc.) for testing purposes?

Question

I tried this for ((i=1; i<=10; i++)); do convert 100MB.pdf 10MB.pdf 100MB.pdf; done to create 100MB file but very quickly run out of RAM.

Any ideas?

Answer 1

The most simple tool: use pdftk (or pdftk.exe, if you are on Windows):

pdftk 10_MB.pdf 100_MB.pdf cat output 110_MB.pdf 

This will be a valid PDF. Download pdftk here.

Update: if you want really large (and valid!), non-optimized PDFs, use this command:

pdftk 100MB.pdf 100MB.pdf 100MB.pdf 100MB.pdf 100MB.pdf cat output 500_MB.pdf 

or even (if you are on Linux, Unix or Mac OS X):

pdftk $(for i in $(seq 1 100); do echo -n "100MB.pdf "; done) cat output 10_GB.pdf