Hey ebook writers. I’ve come across a really cool tool in the last couple days for manipulating pdf files. If you’re not already using CutePDF to render your Word documents into PDFs, I highly recommend it and it’s FREE. But you’ll also want to add this new tool to your writing arsenal. It’s called PDFSAM and I love it. Here’s why…

I wrote an ebook with over 100 pages. Each page had a custom header and footer, so if I tried merging the Word docs together to create one pdf, I would have lost the custom header on each page if I had merged all the Word Docs into one Word Doc before rendering them to PDF. Here are the steps I took.

1. Used CutePDF to “print/render” each file separately to retain the header and footer. CutePDF works brilliantly. Simply click to print your file, and from the PRINTER SELECT dropdown, choose CutePDF. It will save a nice small PDF file to your computer.
2. Once all the my files were PDF-ed,  I merged multiple Word documents into one PDF with PDFsam.

Each page kept it’s own custom header and footer and my ebook is perfect.

There are a number of functions PDFsam will perform

• split your pdf documents (into chapters, single pages, etc.).
• merge many pdf documents or subsections of them.
• extract sections of your document into a single pdf document.
• mix alternate pages taken from two pdf documents in straight or reverse order into a single document.
• rotate pages of the selected pdf documents.
• visually reorder pages of a selected pdf document.
• visually compose a document dragging pages from selected pdf documents.
• save and load your environment to automatize your recurrent jobs.
• manage pdfsam settings and set an environment to load at start up

This free tool is kick butt! Test it out for yourself. We think it’s awesome.