A close friend of mine is currently doing a year long round-the-world trip. Being the sucker nice guy that I am, I have agreed to receive her mail and keep her important documents for her.
Sometimes I have situations where I need to scan stuff for her and send them electronically. Usually my trusty ScanSnap S1300 does the job, but there is the occasional situation where I have to use my flatbed.
However, what happens when I have multiple PDFs that really should go in one document? I needed a way to combine the PDFs together.
There are a million ways to do this, including some I have talked about before like using Preview.app to drag and drop pages, and there are lots of applications that one can use to combine PDFs, but I wanted to do something that would be:
- Already built into the OS and not require any additional software
- Easy to use
- Repeatable so I only have to set it up once and can use it again and again
I came across this great tutorial by George Harito that runs through how to use Automator to create a Service in Snow Leopard to combine PDFs for you. If you don’t know what the heck that means, don’t worry about it. I’ll take you through step by step.
(In case you’re wondering why I don’t just point to George’s tutorial and be done with it, it’s because there are some extra unneeded steps in there that might confuse some people, so I decided to recreate it here. The inspiration comes from George though and he deserves all the credit).
Create The Service
We’re going to be using an application called Automator to set this up. It looks a bit scary but don’t worry, what we’ll be doing is very easy.
Start Automator
- In Finder, go to Applications and then start Automator, the cool little robot icon
Choose Service
- In the window that pops up, highlight Service and then hit Choose
Set Up The PDF Action
- At the top in the middle, you will see a line that says Service receives selected and then a dropdown. Choose PDF files
- In the Library section on the left, you’ll see a line for PDF. Choose that
- In the next column over, there is an option for Combine PDF Pages. Click that and drag it into the the section on the right
Now we want to be able to give our new PDF a name.
- Go to the Library section and choose Files & Folders and drag Rename Finder Items to the canvas under your Combine PDF Pages
- It is going to ask you this: This action will change the names of the Finder items passed into it. Would you like to add a Copy Finder Items action so that the copies are changed and your originals are preserved?. You almost certainly want to hit Don’t Add because you want it to rename the file, not make a copy.
- We want to totally rename the file, so choose Name Single Item
- At the bottom, click on Options and then check Show this action when the workflow runs. It will then prompt you for a name for your new PDF when you run it.
So now we’ve told it to combine the PDFs and give it a name, but now we need to tell it where to put the new file.
- In the Library, still in Files & Folders, drag Move Finder Items to the canvas under your previous action
- You can leave the default location if you want, but click on Options and then check Show this action when the workflow runs. That way, it will ask you where you want to save your new PDF.
Here is the whole rule. Click to embiggen.
Awesome! You’re done. Now go File | Save As and give it a name like Combine PDF Files.
Using the Service
So why did we go through all this trouble to set it up as a Service?
Now any time I ever want to combine a bunch of PDFs, I just need to go to Finder, right click them, and check out the new option that I have:
When I choose Combine PDFs, I get a popup where I give it a name.
Then, another popup appears where I choose where it save it.
Et voila, I have my combined PDF with the 3 files that I had selected in the Finder.
From now on it will be super easy to combine any PDFs.
How about you?
What tricks/processes do you have for combining PDFs on the Mac? Leave a note in the comments or on the Facebook page.
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Hi Brooks,
Thanks for the link to my blog post about combining PDF documents. I must admit, at the time of writing it, I hadn't sorted out all the little issues with my workflow, so I can see how it may be confusing to read through and "play at home" so to speak for those who aren't confident with using Automator.
I'm glad my post inspired you, and it's great that you have taken the initiative to make things a little clearer.
Best,
George
No worries George, it was a great post and thanks again.
This post is awesome and saved me about 2 hours of dragging and dropping… thank you!!
Wow thanks so much Hannah. Glad it helped!
This won't work on Tiger. I had to combine over 60 pdf files and I used Batch PDF Merger to do the trick. SImple, easy and best of all, I was able to arrange the files in any order…nice!
Just want to say thanks, helped a lot, and learned a few things. Thanks for the post
Thanks so much for your feedback Greg!
Thank you so much. Very clearly explained and helpful.
Thanks G.E.! Happy holidays!
awesome. thanks!
No problem Brian, glad it helped!
Like many Windows users, they have to resort to the 500 lb gorilla Adobe Acrobat. Luckily Mac users have this available to them if they are using Snow Leopard. Great post.
Embiggen is a perfectly cromulent word, and this is a superbly cromulent tutorial! Thanks for helping me try Automator, it's kinda cool. And my PDF files go into my new document in the correct order! All I had to do is sort by Date Modified! Oh happy day!
Thanks!
-j
I was waiting for someone to make a Simpsons reference! Glad it helped.
Thank you very much for the very useful instructions! Saved so much time and effort. Thank you.
Great thanks Aubrey glad it helped!
That is awesome thankyou very much. Not being able to right-click and combine PDFs was one shortfall I have found with Apple. Now fixed, thanks.
Great Scottie, so glad it helped!
THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU
Now that's the kind of comment I like. No problem Harper, glad it helped.
Wow, thank you very much, exactly what I needed and did not have to pay Adobe for the privilege.
I just discovered automator and solved my problem, thank you!
Yay hubbub, thanks for letting me know!
great suggestion!
Hey brooks great post! I'm trying to create a very similar automator script using the Folder Actions option, so that every time I add a new PDF (1page) to a certain folder it automatically combines with a certain PDF (2 page) doc, to make a 3 page PDF which I can then rename etc as above. The issue I'm having is it puts my 1 page doc in the middle of the other 2 pages, so its out of order. Any tips on setting this right?
thank you thank you thank you…….
Glad it helped Nish! Thanks for letting me know.