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"Hey Adobe Keep Your License!" Favorite Automator Workflows

O

oneofthesedaves

macrumors regular
Original poster
I needed to combine PDF's into multiple pages but didn't want to shell out an arm and a leg to Adobe to do so. The Adobe rep I spoke with on the phone was so smug about the fact that I would have to buy a $300 license. It left a really bad taste in my mouth, so I just decided to create a workflow in Automator to do what I needed to do. Then I went online and found a nice Adobe icon and swapped the Automator icon for it. Adobe can piss up a rope. I hope Apple buries them.

Anyway, That got me thinking that there might be some other things that Automator would make convenient or fun. Does anybody have any cool Automator workflows to share?
 
GGJstudios said:
If I understand what you're saying, you wanted to combine several separate pdf files into one multi-page pdf. If that's the case, you can easily do that with Preview. Just drag and drop.
Click to expand...

You can drag and drop into one that is already a multipage pdf. Every time I tried to take a single page pdf and drop it into another single page pdf, when you save it, it only saves whichever of the pages is selected, but not both. Is there something I am missing here?

With Automator I can select all ten or so pages that I want, drop them on my icon in the doc and they are automatically dropped in the correct file. I wanted to streamline the process for one of my employees as she will have to do this repetitively hundreds of times.
 
oneofthesedaves said:
You can drag and drop into one that is already a multipage pdf. Every time I tried to take a single page pdf and drop it into another single page pdf, when you save it, it only saves whichever of the pages is selected, but not both. Is there something I am missing here?
Click to expand...
Yes. Open the first pdf in Preview (even a 1-page pdf), then click to turn on the Sidebar. Then drag any other pdf files to the sidebar to add them. You can also rearrange them, delete pages, etc. from the Sidebar.
 
GGJstudios said:
Yes. Open the first pdf in Preview (even a 1-page pdf), then click to turn on the Sidebar. Then drag any other pdf files to the sidebar to add them. You can also rearrange them, delete pages, etc. from the Sidebar.
Click to expand...

Right. I've done that, and it works just fine. The problem happens when you try to save it. You can look at them and rearrange them, etc..but on my Macbook Pro, it will not save all of those pages unless one of the files was already a multipage pdf. If you know how to make it save properly, I'm all ears because I would really like to be able to do that sometimes.
 
oneofthesedaves said:
Right. I've done that, and it works just fine. The problem happens when you try to save it. You can look at them and rearrange them, etc..but on my Macbook Pro, it will not save all of those pages unless one of the files was already a multipage pdf. If you know how to make it save properly, I'm all ears because I would really like to be able to do that sometimes.
Click to expand...

Just File > Save As and create a new document.

Edit: After doing some testing, I've discovered a difference between Preview in Leopard and Snow Leopard.

In Leopard:
  1. Drag additional pdfs to the sidebar to create a multi-page pdf
  2. File > Save As to save the multi-page pdf.
However, that doesn't appear to work in Snow Leopard. In Snow Leopard:
  1. Create the multi-page pdf by dragging and dropping
  2. Click anywhere on the Sidebar
  3. Command-A to select all pages in the Sidebar
  4. File > Print Selected Pages
  5. In the Print dialog box, choose PDF > Save as PDF
 
Last edited:
GGJstudios said:
Just File > Save As and create a new document.
Click to expand...

Yep. That doesn't seem to work on my machine. I just tried it again with two freshly created single page PDF's that were created by printing to PDF. When you do File>save as to create a new document, it just renames whichever page happens to be highlighted in the side bar with the name that you tried to give to the document. When you go back to finder and open the pdf you just named, it only has that one page.
 
Hey, I figured out how to make the multi page PDF the same way that Leopard would work. All you have to do is open the side bar and instead of dragging it just anywhere in the sidebar, you have to drag it into the side bar and drop it on top of the first page, thus creating a "notebook" so to speak. When you want to add another pdf page just continue to drop them on the first page in the side bar. The top side bar page even shows a graphic as if it is spiral bound.🙂
 
oneofthesedaves said:
Hey, I figured out how to make the multi page PDF the same way that Leopard would work. All you have to do is open the side bar and instead of dragging it just anywhere in the sidebar, you have to drag it into the side bar and drop it on top of the first page, thus creating a "notebook" so to speak. When you want to add another pdf page just continue to drop them on the first page in the side bar. The top side bar page even shows a graphic as if it is spiral bound.🙂
Click to expand...
Thanks for this. I'll check it out.
 
OK. Just figured out how to delete a page from the multipage PDF. You can't do it with the mouse. You just have to click on the page once with the mouse and then use the delete key.
🙂🙂🙂🙂😀😀😀
 
oneofthesedaves said:
OK. Just figured out how to delete a page from the multipage PDF. You can't do it with the mouse. You just have to click on the page once with the mouse and then use the delete key.
🙂🙂🙂🙂😀😀😀
Click to expand...
So the only change between Leopard and SL is you have to add the pages at the top, rather than elsewhere in the sidebar?
 
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