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I have saved multiple images from google books. I wanted to convert them to a single pdf file, where in I need some inputs. The below two images(one png and one jpeg) are two continuous pages.

first page(png)

second page(jpeg)

I save them in my system. I converted them to pdf using the command below

convert books.png books.jpeg combined.pdf

However the combined.pdf is not giving me expected results, not the combination of the two.

I also tried making individual pdf files, then combining them using pdftk, with no luck

convert books.png book1.pdf
convert books.jpeg book2.pdf
pdftk book1.pdf book2.pdf cat output combined.pdf
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  • Try changing book1.pdf and book2.pdf to be in one folder, cd to that folder and run pdftk *.pdf cat output onelargepdfile.pdf.
    – Tim
    Jul 9, 2014 at 11:41
  • Tim, Thanks. That also I had tried, however still the same result.
    – user301880
    Jul 9, 2014 at 11:44
  • Thats strange. Maybe it doesn't see the image pdfs as valid pdf files?
    – Tim
    Jul 9, 2014 at 11:44
  • It's quite interesting. I tried doing it on the machine and it is not working as desired. It shows the correct thumbnails though. Jul 9, 2014 at 11:50
  • If you open the image file, and then print it to file, does it let you combine those files?
    – Tim
    Jul 9, 2014 at 11:52

4 Answers 4

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Use convert program (it is an executable installed as part of Imagemagick suite of tools):

convert "*.{png,jpeg}" -quality 100 outfile.pdf

In general case you can combine more files into one pdf file with including them inside {} and separate them with a single comma.

adding -quality VALUE to keep quality after conversion.

convert "*.{ext1,ext2,ext3,...}" -quality 100 outfile.pdf
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  • Is it possible to append image files to existing pdf? Nov 21, 2017 at 5:24
  • 1
    Note that the images are not in alphabetical order. Does somebody know on what rules IM sorts the images? May 26, 2020 at 12:12
  • 2
    @holzkohlengrill it has nothing with IM command, it depends on the shell you are using and locale settings. May 26, 2020 at 12:30
  • 1
    Someone might need to add -density 150 option. Default value is 72 and may be too low.
    – rint
    Apr 24, 2022 at 10:24
15

I used the two sample pages you provided and printed them using cups-pdf printer resulting in two pdf files.

Then I used pdfsam to combine pdf files in one. I see no problem in the result.

Edit: I just saw that you have many files to process, you can use print-selected script in Nautilus described here

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  • 7
    Command line way to do it - Rename the files: mv books.png 1.png, mv books.jpg 2.jpg - Print them to PDFs: lpr -P 'Cups-PDF' 1.png, lpr -P 'Cups-PDF' 2.jpg - Combine PDF files: pdfunite ~/Desktop/1.pdf ~/Desktop/2.pdf complete.pdf. Cup's PDF printer outputs the files to ~/Desktop with the names of the original files - so they both can't be called books.* otherwise they just replace each other. You can list printers and their names with lpstat -p.
    – Wilf
    Jul 9, 2014 at 12:12
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If all the images are in the same folder and have the same extension you could do the following:

Convert images to pdf:

ls *.tif | xargs -I% convert % %.pdf

Note: Note that if they are named 1...tif; 2...tif; 10...tif do ls -1v for numbered files

Merge pdf files into one pdf and remove single page pdfs:

pdftk *.pdf cat output merged.pdf && rm *.tif.pdf
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Use print assistant from Gwenview (KDE image viewer). Open Gwenview, then Plugins -> Images -> Print assistant. Add all the images that you want to print, reorder them as you like, choose number of images per page, other print options, etc. and print to PDF directly or with CUPS-PDF.

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