Learning in a digital world

Where I teach we have a school manual on a wiki. This is fine. People can easily find the part of the manual they are looking for, write comments to the policies, and, if they are given the permission, add or edit policies. The school manual is always up-to-date and easily available. It also saves trees!

But, there is a but. What if staff want to browse the policies being off line? Or, what if one wants to send the entire school manual to someone?

Every part of the school manual is a pdf document. Wouldn’t it be nice if one could merge all these pdf files to one pdf file by the click of a button or two?

Now one can without digging too deep in the pocket book:

A-PDF Merger is a simple, lightning-fast desktop utility program that lets you combine two or more image files or Acrobat PDF files into a single PDF document. Office files can be merged if A-PDF Office to PDF installed. A-PDF Merger provides special merge methods that allow you to combine documents and document parts in a number of different ways to make your work more effective.

You can download it from http://www.a-pdf.com/merger/index.htm. If you like it, pay only USD27 to keep it after the trial period.

I just tried it and it works perfectly. I combined three pdf files and was free to change their order. Each pdf file started on a new page in the final pdf file, which is fine.

From now on, every time we make a change to the school manual we will run the program. The list of pdf files can be exported to a file so when a new pdf file arrives we will just import the list and add the new pdf file wherever we want. Perfect!

By the way, A-PDF Merger has other nice features, but at the moment all we need is what I just described. Read about the other features at http://www.a-pdf.com/merger/index.htm.