Hi Neil & Peter, Thanks Neil for your 'Fun exercise' - "make your own Quicklook preview service" using Automator. I agree with Peter H that Automator is a great feature which is under-used and not understood by many users.
I quite often need to combine multiple PDFs that I have created into a single document (PDF). Below is how I do this using Automator. Combine multiple PDF documents using Automator 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. (Automator’s Robot icon is called ‘Otto’… Otto Matic? :-) 1. Launch Automator, pick Application from the workflow chooser that appears and click Choose. 2. Select PDFs from the Library pane. 3. From the Actions pane drag the Combine PDF Pages action into the workflow area. Be sure that Appending Pages is enabled in this action. 4. Now choose Files & Folders from the Library pane and drag the Move Finder Items action into the workflow, below the first action. 5. Select a destination for the combined PDF file that the workflow will create (the Desktop or Documents folder, for example). 6. 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. Rename the resulting PDF file to a more useful name than the generic “qF36ql.pdf” NOTE: That the documents will appear in alphabetical order within the resulting PDF file. If you care about their arrangement, number them in the order you wish them to appear – 1 Marketing Strategy, 2 Sales Actions, 3 Projected Results, for example. (You can then delete the numbers on the original PDFs after you have completed the ‘workflow’) Cheers, Ronni 17" MacBook Pro 2.3GHz Quad-Core i7 “Thunderbolt" 2.3GHz / 8GB / 750GB @ 7200rpm HD OS X 10.9.1 Mavericks Windows 7 Ultimate (under sufferance)
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