Ghostscript to the Rescue
=========================

Ghostscript is a powerful command-line tool for manipulating PDF
documents. Here are a few useful commands that come in handy for
everyday work.


Append a Single PDF to an Existing PDF
--------------------------------------

	#!/bin/bash

	gs -dBATCH -dNOPAUSE -q -sDEVICE=pdfwrite \
		-sOutputFile=final.tmp.pdf \
		original.pdf single.pdf \
		&& mv final.tmp.pdf final.pdf


Compress a PDF Using the "ebook" Output Profile
-----------------------------------------------

	#!/bin/bash

	gs -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -dCompatibilityLevel=1.4 \
		-dPDFSETTINGS=/ebook \
		-dNOPAUSE -dQUIET -dBATCH \
		-sOutputFile=compressed.pdf \
		original.pdf


Sort PDF Files Alphabetically and Merge Them
--------------------------------------------

	#!/bin/bash

	gs -dBATCH -dNOPAUSE -q -sDEVICE=pdfwrite \
		-sOutputFile=merge_all.pdf \
		$(printf "%s\n" *.pdf | sort)


Notes
-----

The first example appends a PDF to an existing document.

The second example reduces the file size by using Ghostscript's
"ebook" profile, which provides a good compromise between image
quality and compression.

The third example sorts all PDF files in the current directory
alphabetically before merging them into a single document.