You have a handful of PDFs (a CV, a cover letter, three certificates, a scanned passport page) and the form wants one file. Merging them is the easy part. Getting them in the right order, and not ending up with a mess of bookmarks or broken form fields, takes a minute more thought.
This guide uses Merge PDF. It runs in your browser, so the files stay on your device. You need at least two files, and there's no fixed size limit beyond what your device's memory can handle.
Adding PDFs and photos in one go
Drag your files onto the upload box, or tap it to pick them. You can mix PDFs with images: JPG, PNG, WebP, GIF and BMP are all accepted, and each image becomes one page. That's handy when part of the bundle is a photo of a receipt or an ID card and the rest is proper PDFs.
If one of the PDFs is password protected, you'll be asked for the password before it's added.
Getting the order right
Each file shows up as a card in a list. Drag a card by its grip to move it, or use "Move up" and "Move down" if dragging on a phone is fiddly.
For more than a few files, "Sort" is faster. It orders by name (A to Z or Z to A) or by date modified ("Oldest", "Newest"). Sorting by date sounds useful, but dates change when files are copied or downloaded, so in practice it's often wrong.
Sorting by name works well if you name the files on purpose. The trick is to number them with a leading zero:
- 01-cover-letter.pdf
- 02-cv.pdf
- 03-degree-certificate.pdf
- ...
- 10-references.pdf
Without the zero, an alphabetical sort puts 10 before 2, because it compares the first character. With it, A to Z gives you exactly the order you meant.
Taking only some pages from a file
Under each file there's a box labelled "Pages: all (e.g. 1-3, 5, 8-)". Leave it empty to use the whole file. Type a range to use part of it:
- 1-3 takes pages 1, 2 and 3.
- 1-3, 5 adds page 5 as well.
- 8- takes page 8 to the end.
This saves a separate trip to a split tool. A common use is dropping the terms-and-conditions pages from the end of a bank statement, or taking only the signature page from a long contract.
Once the order and page ranges look right:
- Open "More options" if you need any of the settings below.
- Click Merge PDFs.
- Preview the result and download it.
Bookmarks and a table of contents
For a five-page job application, you can ignore this section. For a 200-page report built from a dozen chapters, or a binder of policies, bookmarks are how anyone finds anything in it.
Bookmarks are the clickable outline in the side panel of Adobe Acrobat Reader, Preview on a Mac and most browsers' PDF viewers. "Bookmarks" in More options has four settings:
- "Keep all" keeps each file's own bookmarks, one after another.
- "Discard all" drops them.
- "One entry for each file" ignores the files' own bookmarks and adds one bookmark per file, so the outline becomes a simple list of the documents you merged.
- "Keep all, under one entry for each file" adds one entry per file and nests that file's bookmarks inside it.
For a binder of separate documents, I'd use the last one. You get a tidy top level and still keep each document's internal structure.
"Table of contents" adds an actual page at the start, with one line per file, its page number and a link to it. "Based on file names" uses the file names (another reason to name them well). "Based on document titles" uses the title stored in each PDF's properties, which is great when it's set and useless when every file is titled "Microsoft Word - Document1". "First file is a cover page" keeps your first file at the front, puts the contents page after it and leaves the cover off the list.
There's also "Add file name to page footer", which stamps each page with the name of the file it came from. Useful for bundles of evidence or appendices where people need to cite which document they're looking at.
Double-sided printing and page widths
If the merged file is going to be printed double-sided, there's a catch. A file with an odd number of pages ends on the front of a sheet, so the next file starts on the back of that same sheet. Staple that and the documents are stuck together.
"Double-sided printing" fixes it by adding a blank page after any file with an odd number of pages. Every file then starts on the front of a fresh sheet. Leave it off for anything that will only be read on screen, because blank pages there look like a mistake.
"Make all pages the same width" helps when you've mixed A4 and Letter documents, or a sideways spreadsheet printout with upright letters. Scrolling through the result is less jumpy.
Form fields: why "Merge, rename duplicates" exists
This one only matters if the files contain fillable forms. Fields in a PDF are identified by name, and two fields with the same name share one value. If you merge two forms that both have a field called "Name", then with plain "Merge" typing your name in one fills in the other. That's fine if it's the same person. It's a problem if form one is the applicant and form two is the guarantor.
The options:
- "Discard" removes the fields and keeps the pages.
- "Merge" keeps them, sharing values for any duplicate names.
- "Merge, rename duplicates" keeps them and renames clashing fields so each stays independent.
- "Flatten" turns the filled-in values into ordinary page content first.
If the forms are already filled in and you're sending the bundle off, "Flatten" is the safe choice. If someone still needs to fill them in, use "Merge, rename duplicates".
Fixing things after the merge
If a page is upside down or one page needs to move, don't redo the merge. Open the result in Organize pages to reorder, rotate or delete individual pages.
And if you scanned a double-sided document as two files (all the fronts, then all the backs), merging won't interleave them. That's what Alternate & mix does: it takes page 1 from the first file, page 1 from the second, and so on, with a "Reverse order" option for the backs that came out of the scanner last to first. The phone scanning guide covers that case in more detail.
If the merged file is a page short, look at the page ranges first. It's nearly always a typo, like "1-3,5" when you meant "1-5".
Also useful: Organize pages · Alternate & mix
