Automator workflow of the month: Powerful PDF tricks
PDF is a wonderful format for reading documents, but once you move beyond reading, things can get complicated in a hurry. Thankfully, useful tools for working with PDF files are built into Automator, OS X's built-in workflow tool. Let’s run through a few of them now.
Combine PDF documents
Sometimes you may have multiple PDF files that would be more conveniently viewed as a single document—three files related to the same project, for example. Preview allows you to combine PDF files by opening the first one, choosing View > Thumbnails, and then dragging another PDF into the thumbnails pane. But such manual dragging can be a hassle, particularly when you’re working with many files. Automator lets you do it in a single step.
Launch Automator, pick Application from the workflow chooser that appears, and click Choose. Select PDFs from the Library pane. From the Actions pane drag the Combine PDF Pages action into the workflow area. Be sure that Appending Pages is enabled in this action. Now choose Files & Folders from the Library pane and drag the Move Finder Items action into the workflow, below the first action. Select a destination for the combined PDF file that the workflow will create (the Desktop or Documents folder, for example). Save the workflow as an application and place it on the desktop.
When you wish to combine PDF files, just select them and drag them on top of the workflow. In a short while they’ll be combined into a new PDF file, and that file will appear where you asked Automator to place it.
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