Merging Individual .pdf Into One File

This morning I was uploading slides to Kinkos in preparation for this week's Network Security Operations class at a major managed security services provider (MSSP). One of the class exercises involves students recommending improvements to network diagrams. Until now the documents were all individual .pdf files, but I wanted to upload a single big .pdf with all of the diagrams. You can do this with Adobe Acrobat, but I did not have it.

Thanks to this PDF Hacks excerpt, I learned of pdftk, the PDF Toolkit. It is in the FreeBSD ports tree. I used it like this:

janney:/home/richard$ pdftk *.pdf cat output nso_netdiagrams.pdf

janney:/home/richard$ ls -al nso_netdiagrams.pdf
-rw-r--r--  1 richard  richard  824385 Dec 11 11:00 nso_netdiagrams.pdf

That's it. When I was done, all of the .pdf in the directory were assembled into the single nso_netdiagrams.pdf. Incidentally, I print my .ppt slides directly to .pdf using the free PDFCreator. I know OpenOffice.org also supports this, but I prefer PowerPoint.