I have 1000 groups of 5 pdf files I need to combine/merge. I aware of the "/System/Library/Automator/Combine PDF Pages.action/Contents/Resources/join.py" command and have created the 1000 different versions of the command I need. Currently I am copying and pasting each separate line into Terminal to run it. Is there a way to put all 1000 lines into a script and run the script. Thanks
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Can you add a few samples of your code to the question?– nohillside ♦Mar 29, 2018 at 4:11
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Also, how can the five files to be merged be identified? Do they have specific names, are in a specific directory, or something else?– nohillside ♦Mar 29, 2018 at 4:13
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@patrix All the files are in the one directory, they have specific names and a unique merge file name, there are actually more than 5 files as you will see from the lines below.– Greg AugustinusMar 29, 2018 at 6:08
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@patrix "/System/Library/Automator/Combine PDF Pages.action/Contents/Resources/join.py" -o 71290-Leung-HeiTung-Bernice_5-2-2017.pdf Leung-HeiTung-Bernice_5B-aaY5B-EDITED.pdf Leung-HeiTung-Bernice_5B-ART5BFINAL.pdf Leung-HeiTung-Bernice_5B-CE5Bfinal.pdf Leung-HeiTung-Bernice_5B-DRY5B-FINAL.pdf Leung-HeiTung-Bernice_5B-FRYR5BFINAL.pdf Leung-HeiTung-Bernice_5B-LIB5B.pdf Leung-HeiTung-Bernice_5B-MUY5BEdited2017.pdf Leung-HeiTung-Bernice_5B-PE5BFinal.pdf Not enough characters to add another line, but they all have the same format.– Greg AugustinusMar 29, 2018 at 6:12
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Please edit your question to include this information, it‘s too hard to read as a comment. Also, how do names of which belong together differ from names who don‘t? Any programmatic solution will need to follow some rules to combine the right files– nohillside ♦Mar 29, 2018 at 7:02
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1 Answer
The functionality to combine PDFs is built into Preview.app, and this can be a handy approach for dealing with small numbers of documents.
Recent versions of macOS also have a Python script that automates this process for multiple PDF files. This script is located at:
/System/Library/Automator/Combine\ PDF\ Pages.action/Contents/Resources/join.py
You can run the script directly in Terminal, but it might be handy to add an alias in your ~/.bash_profile:
alias combinepdfs='/System/Library/Automator/Combine\ PDF\ Pages.action/Contents/Resources/join.py'
Instead of typing the long location to the script every time, now you can run this script using a single command! (Don't forget to reload after making changes: source ~/.bash_profile.)
Say I have a directory of lecture notes ~/Documents/Lectures that contains the following files:
lec2.pdf lec3.pdf lec4.pdf lec5.pdf lec6.pdf lec7.pdf lec8.pdf lec9.pdf lec10.pdf lec11.pdf lec12.pdf lec13.pdf lec14.pdf lec15.pdf lec16.pdf lec17.pdf
I can combine these PDF files using the following command:
$ combinepdfs -o lec-combined.pdf lec{2..17}.pdf
The general usage pattern is listed in the help command:
$ combinepdfs --help
Usage: join [--output <file>] [--shuffle] [--verbose]
There is also an extra feature to shuffle pages:
--shuffle
# Take a page from each PDF input file in turn before taking another from each file.
# If this option is not specified then all of the pages from a PDF file are appended
# to the output PDF file before the next input PDF file is processed.
