Creating and merging PDFs on Linux

There are a number of ways that you can create PDFs on a Linux system. You can use an application like LibreOffice or OpenOffice, or you can take advantage of any of a number of commands that can generate PDFs from text files or from a group of other file formats. There are also a number of ways that you can merge a group of PDFs into a single PDF file.

Why PDFs?

PDF is often the preferred format for files that you need to share with others or archive. This is because PDF is an open file format, which makes sharing these files between diverse systems and devices possible.

Using LibreOffice or OpenOffice

Both LibreOffice and OpenOffice can export files as PDFs. You can open an existing document or create a new document and export it as a PDF. OpenOffice’s Export as PDF… and LibreOffice’s Export As => Export as PDF… will do what is required to convert your file.

Generating PDFs from text files

There are also a number of ways that you can create PDFs from text files. The commands below convert a text file to Postscript using vim and then turn the Postscript file into a PDF.

$ vim testfile.txt -c "hardcopy > testfile.ps | q"
$ ps2pdf testfile.ps

The resulting files might look something like these:

$ ls -l testfile*
-rw-rw-r-- 1 shs shs 7928 Feb 24 12:46 testfile.pdf
-rw-rw-r-- 1 shs shs 5864 Feb 24 12:45 testfile.ps
-rw-rw-r-- 1 shs shs   60 Feb 23 17:26 testfile.txt

Generating PDFs from html

Another option for generating PDFs is to convert html files. You can open an html file in either LibreOffice or OpenOffice and then export it as a PDF.