They are Windows launchers for PDFsam Basic, our free and open source application to split and merge PDF files.
PDFsam Basic is written in Java and requires a Java Runtime Environment to run (pretty much like a C# application requires .NET framework installed, a Python application requires a Python interpreter etc etc). Launching PDFsam Basic would require you to execute a command to tell the Java Runtime Environment “hey, start PDFsam”, a command that in its simplest form looks like java -jar pdfsam-community-3-3-5.jar
and that can be executed in a terminal window or using a .bat script.
We don’t want you to have to open a terminal and run the above command, we do provide a .bat in the bin subdirectory but we also provide an .exe launcher, pdfsam-starter.exe
for PDFsam Basic 2.x and pdfsam.exe
for PDFsam Basic 3.x.
These launchers have a proper application icon (unlike the .bat) and perform a registry search to make sure the correct version of Java is installed on the machine, if not they notify the user, if yes they run the command launching the PDFsam Basic application.