How do you combine PDFs in ruby?

Question

This was asked in 2008. Hopefully there's a better answer now.

How can you combine PDFs in ruby?

I'm using the pdf-stamper gem to fill out a form in a PDF. I'd like to take n PDFs, fill out a form in each of them, and save the result as an n-page document.

Can you do this with a native library like prawn? Can you do this with rjb and iText? pdf-stamper is a wrapper on iText.

I'd like to avoid using two libraries (i.e. pdftk and iText), if possible.

Answer 1

If you want to add any template (created by macOS Pages or Google Docs) using the combine_pdf gem then you can try with this:

final_pdf = CombinePDF.new
company_template = CombinePDF.load(template_file.pdf).pages[0]
pdf = CombinePDF.load (content_file.pdf)
pdf.pages.each {|page| final_pdf << (company_template << page)} 
final_pdf.save "final_document.pdf"

Answer 2

Haven't seen great options in Ruby- I got best results shelling out to pdftk:

system "pdftk #{file_1} multistamp #{file_2} output #{file_combined}"