Now in the Utilities section of the Library, find our old friend Set Value of Variable and (you guessed it) drag it into the main window under our last step. (Basically that is going through the PDFs that you are splitting and copying the folders that they are stored in.) Repeat with itemNum from 1 to count of inputĬopy POSIX path of (container of (item itemNum of input)) to end of pathList In the Run AppleScript window, paste in this code: Drag it to the main window under our last step. Still in the Utilities section of the Library on the left, find Run AppleScript. Note: if you’re an Automator expert and know a better way to do this, please leave a comment! I could prompt the user to choose a path, but I wanted to make it automatic so we have to get a bit geeky. It doesn’t make it easy to save the resulting PDF to the same folder as the original. We are doing this step because of a weird way Automator works. Here’s what the first rule looks like so far. In the Variable dropdown, choose New variable… and call it originalPDFs. Now in the Library section on the left, click on Utilities and then find Set Value of Variable. I haven’t tested it in other applications. Automator Choose Service Set The Variable For The Original PDFsĪt the top of the window at the right, change the Service receives selected dropdown to PDF files. In the window that pops up, highlight Service and then hit Choose. In Finder, go to Applications and then start Automator. If you have seen my How to Split PDFs tutorial, this is basically the reverse. We’re going to use a Mac OS X tool called Automator to set this up. Repeatable so I only have to set it up once and can use it again and again.

Already built into the OS and not require any additional software.

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: However, what happens when you have multiple PDFs that really should go in one document? How do you combine PDFs together? Many scanners let you choose between scanning one-PDF-per-page or scanning all the pages into one big PDF.

Automator for mac os x pdf