Orpheus

Merge PDF Files

Join several PDFs into one document, in the order you choose.

Every tool runs entirely in your browser. Your files are never uploaded to a server.

Merging PDFs joins several files into one document in the order you choose. Pages are copied across untouched, so text stays selectable and quality is unchanged. This tool runs inside your browser, so nothing is uploaded.

How to use Merge PDF

  1. Add your PDFs. Drag two or more files onto the drop zone, or click to browse. They are listed in the order they will be joined.
  2. Choose the order. Keep the order you added them in, or sort by filename. Filename order is counted numerically, so page 2 lands before page 10.
  3. Merge and save. One PDF comes back containing every page. Download it straight to your device.

About merging PDF files

Merging is the one PDF operation people reach for most and understand least, because the word covers two quite different things. Joining documents — what this tool does — copies the page objects from each source file into a new document and writes a fresh cross-reference table. Nothing is re-encoded, so a scanned page stays exactly as sharp or as soft as it was, and searchable text remains searchable. What merging does not do is combine documents intelligently. Bookmarks and outlines that pointed into the original files are not rebuilt, form fields with matching names can collide, and digital signatures are invalidated the moment a signed document is altered in any way, which includes being copied into a new container. That is a property of the PDF signature format, not a limitation here. The file size of the result is roughly the sum of the inputs, sometimes slightly less where identical fonts are shared between them, and occasionally slightly more where each source embedded its own subset of the same typeface. If the combined file matters more than perfect fidelity, run it through a compressor afterwards rather than expecting the merge itself to shrink anything. Order is the other thing worth checking before you commit: a set of scans named page-1 through page-10 sorts wrongly under plain alphabetical rules, which is why filename sorting here counts the digits as numbers.

Frequently asked questions

Does merging reduce quality?
No. Pages are copied from one document into another without being re-encoded, so text stays selectable, images keep their original resolution and the result is visually identical to the inputs.
How do I control which file comes first?
Files merge in the order shown in the list, which is the order you added them. If you dropped a whole folder at once and that order is wrong, switch to filename sorting — it counts numerically, so scan-2 sorts before scan-10 rather than after it.
Can I merge a password-protected PDF?
Not directly. An encrypted PDF has to be decrypted before its pages can be copied, and this tool will tell you rather than hand you a broken file. Open it in your PDF reader, save a copy without the password, then merge that.
How many files can I merge at once?
Twenty on the free tier, up to 30 MB each. The real ceiling is your own memory, because the whole document is assembled in the browser rather than on a server.
What if one of my files is damaged?
The merge stops and names the file that could not be read. That is deliberate: silently leaving a document out of a merge would hand you a file that looks complete and is not. Remove or repair that one and run it again.
Is anything uploaded?
No. The merge happens in a Web Worker on your machine. You can open your browser network tab and watch it stay empty while the file is produced.

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