The scanning of DNily

I no longer have Adobe Creative Suite at home, which is inconvenient. I know how to do what I need to capture DN back issues with CS. I've been working for days on a new process. Gimp is a free graphics program. It seems versatile, but apparently won't combine pdfs into one. Foxit is a good free pdf reader & maker, but it also won't combine pdfs. I turned belatedly to converting pdfs to images & combining them in libreoffice writer, then exporting them back to pdf. I need to experiment more, but I think I'm close. Soon, digitizing will resume with DN 58.