Combining PDFs with Automator in OS X Leopard
2008-03-30
Ever wanted to combine multiple individual PDF files into a single PDF document? Say you were scanning a paper document, a page at a time, and wanted to collate the digital pages back into a single document. Or collect together a number of similar PDFs you'd generated
via 'Print to PDF', perhaps to send via email.
You can do this incredibly simply in Leopard, without resorting to any additional software. PDF is such a fundamental component of Mac OS X, you can script operations like this using a very simple Automator workflow.
Just build the following sequence of actions.
1. Files & Folders: - Get Selected Finder Items
2. PDFs: - Combine PDF Pages
3. Files & Folders: - Open Finder Items
Select all the individual pages in a Finder window, and then run the workflow. After a short wait, while the actions are run, a multi-page PDF will open in Preview. Choose 'Save As', to create a new file. Notice the optional Quartz Filter operations you can apply to the new document when you save.