Interleave merge pdf files

[ssteward at accesspdf.com]

Mark Jackson wrote:
> "Chirayu Krishnappa" <chirayuk at gmail.com> writes:
> > Hi,
> >
> > I need to scan documents with pages having printed matter on both
> > sides. It is easiest to stack them in the autosheet feeder and let it
> > scan. I end up with one file (say A.pdf) containing the odd pages in
> > sequence. Similarly, I can end up with B.pdf containing the even pages.
> > I want to combine them into result.pdf which contains A.1, B.1, A.2,
> > B.2, A.3, B.3, ... (A.1 = page 1 of A.pdf).
> >
> > Does someone know a simple way to achieve this? I noticed the other
> > thread on this newsgroup about merging lots of pdf files and
> > multivalent tools and pdftk were mentioned. However, I could not find a
> > way to do this using them. I am interested in another free tool or a <
> > 25 lines python script (which may use any freeware library) to do the
> > same.
>
> I face exactly the same problem.  Based on examination of the pdftk man
> page I *think* it can be done by something like (untested):
>
> pdftk A.pdf burst output %04d_A.pdf
> pdftk B.pdf burst output %04d_B.pdf
> pdftk *_?.pdf cat output combined.pdf
>
> assuming fewer than 10,000 pages per document, of course.
>
> I would be interested in an alternative approach which does not
> generate a ton of intermediate pdfs.
>

Here is a page that offers a couple related scripts (one bash script,
one DOS batch script) for doing this with pdftk in one swipe:

http://www.accesspdf.com/article.php/2005020408520076

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