April 2024 : Difficult to Insert a PDF Into Another PDF Which Both Reside on Google Drive

Software
1

Situation:
Both PDFs saved to Google Drive; Needed to remove a page from one PDF and insert a page from another PDF. Preferred not to save the file locally to achieve this; work with the files as they are on remote Google Drive and not occupy space on device’s storage.

Experience:
Wow. This seems mired in paid services only!

PDF Expert by Readdle on iOS on iPhone

Readdle’s PDF Expert could have maybe handled this, but seemed to stall on retrieving the second PDF to grab a page from.

Chrome OS

Did not have the necessary default PDF editing capability needed to achieve my need.

Adobe’s Cloud Services

Seemed way too expensive.

I was at my elderly Father’s house, so I had limited options available to me. That said, I am now at home and able to use Preview.app on OS X to achieve what I want to achieve. It just baffles me that this was so mired in paywall type options.

It does seem there is something called Kami, and another Linux tool that I could have installed on the Chrome OS device. An Android app called Xodo Docs is another option.

2

AFAIK there is no way to do this in any browser without using a plugin. And these plugins actually perform the edit on another website which would be a risk if the information in the PDF was sensitive.

You can open PDFs in Google Docs, make edits, then save the new document as a PDF. But that would still have required you save the file locally then upload the new PDF. And would not work at all if the PDFs were forms, etc.

I wouldn’t have been able to perform the edits under these conditions either.