Does ‘Data > Merge’ not work for PDFs consisting of scanned images?
I’ve read the manual, and it doesn’t indicate one way or the other. But I can’t make it work. No error message, just… a echoing lack of response. (When merging RTFs, I get a new merged document, which is what I expected.)
I can move everything to Acrobat and build a binder and reimport it, but that’s just a PITA. Is that the right answer?
Thanks,
StephenStephen, no, DT Pro can’t merge PDF files. It takes Acrobat or one of several third party utilities to do that.
Maybe one of these days Apple will add that to PDFKit’s capabilities.
Apparently there is a way to join PDFs using automator. I have no idea how, but here is something I picked up on MacUpdate. There is also a little program called PDF Joiner which I use occasionally and it does a fair job. Anyway, here’s the blurb:
“In Tiger it’s possible to make an automator mudule which does this in a very easy way : select PDFs within finder, control-click, select the automator module, obtain the joined PDF directly in Preview. Only one minor difficulty : need to find a way to sort input PDFs - I just used alphabetical order, but creation date or other criteria are easy to implement.”
I leave it to more knowledgeable users to elaborate!
Alexandria
Alexandria, thanks for reminding me. I think Annard has worked on an automator that will merge PDF files.
You can do this from the command line too, with a default installation of tiger by issuing the following command
python ‘/System/Library/Automator/Combine PDF Pages.action/Contents/Resources/join.py’ -o output_file.pdf file1.pdf file2.pdf files*.pdf
By the way, though it takes a bit of effort to set up (you have to download one program and install it, plus configure a virtual printer), you might try my script for devonthink that will combine all selected items into a single pdf and pull it back into devon think and or apple’s mail program. (I use it for mailing blocks of clippings to students). That script is at:
devon-technologies.com/phpBB … php?t=2817
erico
PDF Lab is freeware that handles join/split PDF operations very nicely.
Just drag and drop files to join them or select the pages that you want to split into separate files.
It’s available from VersionTracker or the developer:
Donations requested, and well worth it.
Thanks, Will. This is much nicer than PDF Joiner. It’s amazing what you can do these days for free. Used to be you had to have Acrobat to do such things.
Alexandria
PDFLab doesn’t seem entirely happy using Java J2SE 5.0 (1.5) on 10.4.7. The simpler Combine PDFs works fine.
Two programs to try! Thanks to you both!!
Alexandria
Hopefully you’ll have more success with PDFLabs than I’ve had. Pretty much every action fails for me and generates Java errors in the console log.