Combining many files into a single, easy-to-share PDF is a day-to-day task within industries like legal, government, financial, and accounting. These PDFs might be filed with the Courts, shared with clients, or archived to comply with retention and audit requirements.

Combining PDFs manually – by printing each document and scanning them in the required order – isn't efficient. If there's a change to the contents or the documents' order, you'll need to start again.

Binder Project Mode in pdfDocs is a way of working that simplifies and speeds up the process of combining PDFs.

What is Binder Project Mode?

When working in Binder Project Mode, you can combine multiple PDFs and non-PDF files related to a specific case, project, or matter into a single PDF binder.

A Binder Project (.bdr file) provides an efficient way to work on documents of different file types but relate to a single piece of work. That's because you can add documents to a Binder Project and keep them in their original format. You don't need to convert to or from PDF each time you edit a document.

Working with Binder Projects, you can:

• Edit, re-arrange, and re-name documents
• Add Watermarks, Numbering Sets, and Security
• Set Initial View settings
• Assign a Cover Page
• Auto-generate Bookmarks and Indexes
• Auto-generate a fully customizable Table of Contents
• Use in-house Word templates and styles to generate the Table of Contents
• Add or remove documents from the Project and regenerate the Table of Contents
• Take a 'snapshot' of the Project to capture its contents at a certain point in time
  
  

You can use existing Binder Projects as templates for future projects, saving time and ensuring PDF binders are consistent across different teams.

Structured or Unstructured Binder Project?

A Binder Project can contain no folders or several folders.

Unstructured Binder Projects require no folders – but simply collate a mixture of related documents.

Structured Binder Projects require documents to be grouped in defined sections using folders and sub-folders. The Table of Contents will reflect those sections/sub-sections on generating the binder output.

Single or multiple PDF binder?

When you combine PDFs using pdfDocs Binder Project Mode, you can choose to create a single or multiple PDF binder.

When you choose a single PDF binder, all documents in the Binder Project are collated into one PDF, including the Table of Contents. This is ideal when you want to create a single self-contained PDF that can be sent to a third party or saved into your document management system.

If the Binder Project has many hundreds of documents, then a single PDF binder may be a very large PDF and become unmanageable. That's when the multiple PDF binder option may be better.

When you choose a multiple PDF binder, all documents in the Binder Project are saved individually to a folder on disk. The Table of Contents references each of these individual documents. This ensures that you don't end up with one single unmanageable PDF.

You can then share the output folder that contains all the individual documents and the Table of Contents.

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