PDFsam Basic — The Complete Guide: Free Merging, Splitting and Rearranging of PDF Files
PDFsam Basic is an open-source tool (AGPLv3) for working with PDF pages. It runs locally, so it suits drawings and client documents that must not be uploaded to online PDF services.
PDFsam Basic
Sober Lemur
Split, merge, rotate and extract PDF pages — for drawing sets, specifications and submissions.
Get it from the vendorWhat you get
- Merge — combining many files into one, with bookmarks and a table of contents.
- Split — by pages, by bookmarks or by file size.
- Rotate — fixing A3 sheets that were scanned sideways.
- Extract pages — pulling selected pages into a new file.
- Alternate mix — combining separate scans of odd and even pages.
Mind the edition
Choose the free Basic edition. The company also offers other paid products, such as a full PDF editor — you do not need them for these tasks.
Related tools
For fast PDF viewing — SumatraPDF. For handwritten notes on PDFs — Xournal++. For exporting documents to PDF — LibreOffice.
SumatraPDF
Krzysztof Kowalczyk
A tiny, very fast PDF reader for Windows — opens heavy drawings instantly, and reads ePub and DjVu too.
Get it from the vendor
Xournal++
Xournal++ team
Handwriting and PDF annotation with a stylus — markups on drawings, lecture notes and problem solving.
Get it from the vendor
LibreOffice
The Document Foundation
A full office suite — documents, spreadsheets, presentations and drawings, compatible with Office files.
Get it from the vendor
7-Zip
Igor Pavlov
File compression and extraction — ZIP, 7z, RAR and more, with strong compression and AES-256 encryption.
Get it from the vendorThe bottom line
PDFsam Basic turns assembling a submission set from dozens of files into a one-minute job — with no cost and nothing uploaded.