PDFsam

When it comes to manipulating PDF documents, it is always better to look for third party applications, rather than relying on default tools. If you wish to split your documents, merge them or place their pages in a different order, then you should definitely try PDFsam, because it makes everything quite easy. The application is offered free of charge and it is also open source. What's more, PDFsam is written in Java, which makes it cross-platform. You can use it on Mac OS X, Windows, Linux and other operating systems that provide support for Java.

PDFsam provides you with several plug-ins for splitting PDF documents, merging them and performing other operations. They are organized in a tree structure, on the left side of the window and their controls can be found in the larger area on the right. In most cases, you only need to load one or more PDF files, make a few output settings and click a button to start processing the files. When it comes to saving the new files, you can set PDFsam to store them in the same folder as the source files or in a different one, to overwrite existing files and to compress the output documents, regardless of what operation you intend to perform.

Besides merging or splitting documents, you can also reorder its pages. If you load the file in the reordering plug-in, the application will display its pages as thumbnails and you can place them in any order you want, by simply clicking and dragging. It is also possible to reverse and rotate the pages. A similar tool is the visual document composer, but instead of reordering pages, you may compose new documents, with pages from two or more PDFs.

The best part about PDFsam is that it provides all the options you need, for each operation, without cluttering the interface. You can make all sorts of tweaks, without spending any time looking for the appropriate options.