I've done this before. I had a pdf that I generated with fpdf, and I needed to add on a variable amount of PDFs to it.
So I already had an fpdf object and page set up (http://www.fpdf.org/)
And I used fpdi to import the files (http://www.setasign.de/products/pdf-php-solutions/fpdi/)
FDPI is added by extending the PDF class:
$fileArray= array("name1.pdf","name2.pdf","name3.pdf","name4.pdf");
$datadir = "save_path/";
$outputName = $datadir."merged.pdf";
$cmd = "gs -q -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOutputFile=$outputName ";
//Add each pdf file to the end of the command
foreach($fileArray as $file) {
$cmd .= $file." ";
}
$result = shell_exec($cmd);
I forgot the link from where I found it, but it works fine.
Note: You should have gs (on linux and probably Mac), or Ghostscript (on windows) installed for this to work.
I created an abstraction layer over FPDI (might accommodate other engines).
I published it as a Symfony2 bundle depending on a library, and as the library itself.
add the following to your php code where $file1 is the location and name of the first PDF file, $file2 is the location and name of the second and $newfile is the location and name of the destination file
I've had similar problem in my software. We've wanted to merge several PDF files into one PDF file and submit it to an outer service. We've been using the FPDI solution as shown in Christa's solution.
However, the input PDF's we've been using could be in version higher than 1.7. We've decided to evaluate the FPDI commercial add-on. However, it turned out that some of the documents scanned by our office copier were having malformed indexes, which crashed the commercial FPDI add-on. So we've decided to use Ghostscript solution as in Chauhan's answer.
But then we got some strange metadata in the output PDF properties.
Finally we've decided to join two solutions to get PDF's merged and downgraded by Ghostscript, but the metadata is set by FPDI. We don't know yet how it would work with some advanced formatted pdfs, but for scans we use it works just fine. Here's our class excerpt:
class MergedPDF extends \FPDI
{
private $documentsPaths = array();
public function Render()
{
$outputFileName = tempnam(sys_get_temp_dir(), 'merged');
// merge files and save resulting file as PDF version 1.4 for FPDI compatibility
$cmd = "/usr/bin/gs -q -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH -dCompatibilityLevel=1.4 -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOutputFile=$outputFileName";
foreach ($this->getDocumentsPaths() as $pdfpath) {
$cmd .= " $pdfpath ";
}
$result = shell_exec($cmd);
$this->SetCreator('Your Software Name');
$this->setPrintHeader(false);
$numPages = $this->setSourceFile($outputFileName);
for ($i = 1; $i <= $numPages; $i++) {
$tplIdx = $this->importPage($i);
$this->AddPage();
$this->useTemplate($tplIdx);
}
unlink($outputFileName);
$content = $this->Output(null, 'S');
return $content;
}
public function getDocumentsPaths()
{
return $this->documentsPaths;
}
public function setDocumentsPaths($documentsPaths)
{
$this->documentsPaths = $documentsPaths;
}
public function addDocumentPath($documentPath)
{
$this->documentsPaths[] = $documentPath;
}
}
I have tried similar issue and works fine, try it. It can handle different orientations between PDFs.
// array to hold list of PDF files to be merged
$files = array("a.pdf", "b.pdf", "c.pdf");
$pageCount = 0;
// initiate FPDI
$pdf = new FPDI();
// iterate through the files
foreach ($files AS $file) {
// get the page count
$pageCount = $pdf->setSourceFile($file);
// iterate through all pages
for ($pageNo = 1; $pageNo <= $pageCount; $pageNo++) {
// import a page
$templateId = $pdf->importPage($pageNo);
// get the size of the imported page
$size = $pdf->getTemplateSize($templateId);
// create a page (landscape or portrait depending on the imported page size)
if ($size['w'] > $size['h']) {
$pdf->AddPage('L', array($size['w'], $size['h']));
} else {
$pdf->AddPage('P', array($size['w'], $size['h']));
}
// use the imported page
$pdf->useTemplate($templateId);
$pdf->SetFont('Helvetica');
$pdf->SetXY(5, 5);
$pdf->Write(8, 'Generated by FPDI');
}
}
Both the accepted answer and even the FDPI homepage seem to give botched or incomplete examples. Here's mine which works and is easy to implement. As expected it requires fpdf and fpdi libraries: