Photoshop is a really power tool when creating documents. One of the things it can do is creat PDF files. The problem with this is, that it saves individual files, or pages, one at a time. Lets say you want to create a ten page pamphlet, what do you do? Well, there are some programs out there that can help with the process.
For starters, you can buy Adobe Acrobat to create and edit existing PDF files, but if you already own Photoshop, you really don’t need it to get this done. If you are creating fill in forms, then yes, you may want to invest in Acrobat, but you don’t need it if all you are doing is making printable brochures and flyers.
So, first thing you will want to do is create each PDF page in Photoshop. Start a new file, with the documents settings to inches instead of pixels, then 8.5 for width, 11 for height, then ppi to 300dpi (Set higher for larger documents, but be warned, your final pdf could end up over 30meg per page, which if you have three pages to merge would create a PDF close to 100meg) Create each custom page, usign the same size dimension settings and dpi. Save each of them, 1 through whatever, in the order you want them in.
Now comes the merge part. Head on over to http://www.pdfhacks.com/pdftk/ and download the pdftk program. There are versions for both Linux and Windows. (stand alone binary for windows – no need to install anything, apt-get install pdftk for you ubuntu users)
Open a command prompt in windows or a terminal in linux. Now type the following, assuming these are your file names:
“pdftk 1.pdf 2.pdf 3.pdf etc… cat MyMergedFile.pdf”
pdftk [input1] [input2] [inputetc] cat [outputfilename]
Cat will merge all the files, in the order you specify, to one output file “MyMergedFile.pdf”. Once done, you can also compress the document, but you won’t really gain large size reductions, so I usually skip this part:
“pdftk MyMergedFile.pdf output Compressed.pdf compress”
pdftk [inputfile] output [outputname] compress
You should now have a nice, single file booklet or flyer, ready to send to your website, clients, or printer.