Scanning Documents - Questions

[Garden Manager]

I have recently decided to start scanning articles from gardening magazines so that i can save the information but get rid of the magazines themeselves. I have an epson all in one printer and asociated software which gives me the option of scanning in a number of formats, including multipage PDF files which seem to come out really good, however due to a software glitch or hardware fault i cant seem to include all the pages i want in one file and end up with lots of smaller PDF files rather than a few bigger ones.

I looked into PDF software that would let me join together several pages/files but all i could come up with were ones that either converted single page documents in other formats, converted PDFs to other formats or did far more than i needed and were expensive into the bargain.

I then looked at scanning the pages as JPEGs and them putting them together in Word and them converting them to PDF. This seemed a very long winded route and not particularly satisfactory (lower quality images), compared to a directly scanned PDF copy.

I was wondering if anyone could suggest/recomend any software that could help me, or offer any alternative solutions or document formats that would be better than Jpeg or PDF.

It has not helped that my scanner/scanner software does not seem to be working as it should.

All in One printer model: Epson Sylus photo RX520

Software: Epson proprietary scanner software that camre with the printer

PC and OS: Packard Bell desktop, Windows 7 Home Premium x64

[Garden Manager]

[BarriedaleNick]

PDF is probably the best format - jpg not so much.
You could try this online PDF merge http://foxyutils.com/mergepdf/
or this free PDF merge and split prog  http://www.pdfsam.org/?page_id=32 - just select the Basic download..

[Garden Manager]

PDF is probably the best format - jpg not so much.
You could try this online PDF merge http://foxyutils.com/mergepdf/
or this free PDF merge and split prog  http://www.pdfsam.org/?page_id=32 - just select the Basic download..

Thanks for the links. Tried both and they work well. Took me a while to work out the first one was a web based merger utility rather than downloadable software though!!

PDF does look the best way to go doesn't it?

One more question. If i had a load of individual pages in Jpeg format and i wanted to put them into one PDF file, how would i best go about it? is it better to join them together as Jpeg's and them convert to PDF or convert all the files to PDF and then merge them using the software you told me about?

Thanks again.

[BarriedaleNick]

Convert JPG to PDFs and then merge.. 
JPGs dont nativelty support multipage documents - you would have use TIF format for multipage images!
BUT!!
You might want to concider something like PrimoPDF.  It basically installs as a printer and you "print" to a pdf file.  So you can multi select your JPGs - right click - print - primopdf.  Its basically one operation  There are options to play with but it is pretty easy to use.  You can even append additions images to the PDF.  And its free..

http://www.primopdf.com/

[lincsyokel2]

MS Word will print to a PDF file. Scan them as jpegs, load them onto word pages, print them as PDF