Hi Everbody,
is there a way to merge PDFs in Devonthink Pro 2 beta? If not, does anybody know if there are plans to add this feature?
Thanks and best regards
Thomas
Here’s a way to insert pages from one PDF into another PDF in DEVONthink 2:
Display two open PDFs side-by-side, with the slide-outs of each showing page thumbnails.
Drag the selected thumbnail of one or more pages from one PDF to the thumbnails of the other, inserting at the desired page position.
Which seems doable with two files, but what if you want to merge more than two pdfs? Opening five pdfs and dragging files seems, well, a bit of a drag. Back to the poster’s question: any other way or plans for the future?
I agree. Doing a lot of merging as I described would be a drag — possible, but sheer drudgery.
As DEVONthink 2 uses Apple’s PDFKit, which doesn’t currently have extensive capabilities for merging PDFs, there are other options.
Automator may have potential. IIRC, it’s not yet available in public beta1.
I’ve got two applications that make combining PDFs easy. PDFpenPro allows one to insert another PDF immediately after the page being viewed, or to combine selected PDFs using AppleScript. Acrobat also allows one to insert another PDF into the one being viewed. Ease comes with a price, although PDFpenPro is much cheaper than Acrobat.
Yes, I currently do all mine in Acrobat, being lucky to have have qualified for an academic license and hence a reduced cost. But I’ve used PDFpenPro just to trial and it is a decent alternative. We’ll see what Automator brings once it’s in the beta.
You don’t need to drag thumbnails. You can open just one pdf, and then drag the icon of another pdf into the thumbnail sidebar. When the pointer has the green plus sign, let go, and then all the pages of that pdf will appear in the sidebar. You can repeat this with the other five pages.
You can also select the five pages and drag them onto the sidebar, but then you will not have control over the order of the pdfs.
-Simon