How do you merge protected PDF files?

[john_pali]

I need to write a script in PHP that combines a list of PDF files into a single PDF.

I've had a look at pdftk (it wouldn't compile on our centos web server so I tried the windows version) and whilst it generally works well, it wouldn't merge password secured pdfs without the password (which we don't have).

If I was doing it on Windows, there are programs that install themselves to look like a printer driver to the OS and create PDFs of documents that are "printed" to it. So I'd write a script that would print all the PDFs in a single print job, and it would generate a single pdf.

I'm sure there is a much more ellegant way to do it in Linux, but how? I've been searching all morning and not found anything suitable.

btw go easy please I don't have much experience with linux (though I like what I see).

[jmadero]

if this is a one time use you might want to check this out, there is a trial version but the real version costs $20. I can't seem to find much else to use

Combine/Merge PDF and Image Files into a Single PDF Document. [A-PDF.com]

Just to be clear, you need to merge pdf's with different passwords into one document and then...have that document password protected or no?

[john_pali]

Hi, Thanks for the reply

I should have mentioned that it needs to work in a web application, i.e. user uploads PDF files, php script merges uploaded files to a single pdf.

[laser_the_man]

I should have mentioned that it needs to work in a web application, i.e. user uploads PDF files, php script merges uploaded files to a single pdf.

I encountered a similar problem. I wanted to merge some IBM DB2 Certificates with my application papers. This failed due the password protection of these certificates. After playing around with a lot of (commercial) tools I solved the problem with:

gs -dBATCH -dNOPAUSE -q -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOutputFile=out.pdf in1.pdf in2.pdf

It seems that

gs -dBATCH -dNOPAUSE -q -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOutputFile=out.pdf in.pdf

removes the encryption in some way...