I'm currently delivering all my talks with PDF format slides, using Jakob's PDF Presenter Console, which is awesome but lacks a "goto slide" button and is a little slow to click forward. It doesn't matter for a short talk but I had 200+ slides for my ZCE preparation tutorial at the Dutch PHP Conference and I was concerned about losing my place! Therefore I split my slides up into several decks, but still need to publish them as a whole.

For years I've used PDF Shuffler for this sort of thing but I wondered if there was an easy way of doing this from the command line this time, since I literally wanted to glue together a bunch of files one after another. Predictably, there is and it's called pdftk - the PDF Toolkit.It does exactly what I need, but I initially stumbled at supplying all the PDFs in order. My files are called 1-intro.pdf, 2-basics.pdf, and so on. Which is fine but there are 14 of them and when sorted, 9-oop.pdf is the last entry :) I untangled this with:

ls *-*.pdf | sort -n > files.txt

One vim macro later and I had them all on one line (yes, I realise there must be a better way to do this, leave me a comment and tell me what it is!), and so I could pass them into pdftk:

pdftk 1-intro.pdf 2-basics.pdf 3-strings.pdf 4-arrays.pdf 5-functions.pdf 6-files.pdf 7-config.pdf 8-qstyles.pdf 9-oop.pdf 10-http.pdf 11-api-data.pdf 12-security.pdf 13-databases.pdf 14-tips.pdf cat output all.pdf

So there you have it, a great little tool that I will immediately forget the name of so hopefully I'll remember to come and read my blog to remember what to do ...