Re: pdfjoin loses web links in the PDFs

[Gary Dale <garyndp@gmail.com>]

On 2018-11-19 6:58 a.m., Steve McIntyre wrote:
> Jonathan Dowland wrote:
> > On Sun, Nov 18, 2018 at 04:16:21PM -0500, Gary Dale wrote:
> > > This is frustrating. I'm running Debian/Buster (AMD64) and just
> > > finished creating web links (mostly mailto:<e-mail address> in a
> > > two-part directory I created using Scribus. I exported the files to
> > > PDF on a Debian/Stretch machine because Buster uses a version of
> > > Ghostscript that breaks the PDF export in Scribus (they recently broke
> > > it on Stretch as well, but I put the older Ghostscript 9.20 version on
> > > hold so I can still use Scribus).
> > >
> > > The PDF files I created worked fine individually but when I tried to
> > > merge them into a single PDF, the web links are lost. I'm not sure if
> > > this a limitation of pdfjoin or a bug in the current implementation.
> > That is frustrating. All I can suggest is experimenting with an
> > alternative PDF joiner. I believe pdftk can do it (pdftk *pdf cat output
> > out.pdf)
> qpdf also works well for me, although the command line can be a little
> baroque...
It does seem a little odd to have to specify the file to manipulated as 
"empty" then add the pages from the two files I wanted to merge, but it 
did work. The links were preserved.

In my case the command line read:

    qpdf --empty --pages cabinet.pdf 1-z clubs.pdf 1-z -- 
2018-2019-directory.pdf

where the first 2 pdf files are the input and the last one is the output.