Hello group,
A couple of times I and others have asked about a way to combine PDF
files using a RunRev script. I don't recall ever seeing an answer, so
I would like to share the solution that I found.
There is an Automator action under OS X that combines PDFs. Someone
on an Automator mailing list looked into that action and found that
it was run by a fairly simple Python script. Since Python scripts can
be run from the Shell, it was fairly straight forward to adopt that
to RunRev. Here is the actual commnad:
get shell("python '/System/Library/Automator/Combine PDF
Pages.action/Contents/Resources/join.py' -o" && outputFile &&
inputFiles
outputFile is the full path to the file you are creating that
contains all the PDF pages. It must be surrounded by single quotes.
E..g., '/Bruce/Documents/Patents/5000000.pdf'
inputFiles is a list of full paths to the files you are combining
with each full path surrounded by single quotes and each separated
from the other by a space. E.g.,
'/Bruce/Documents/Patents/5000000/5000000-001.pdf'
'/Bruce/Documents/Patents/5000000/5000000-002.pdf'
'/Bruce/Documents/Patents/5000000/5000000-003.pdf'
'/Bruce/Documents/Patents/5000000/5000000-004.pdf'
The one "gotcha" is that a shell command cannot have more than 1024
characters. So if you want to combine a lot of pages, you will need
to incrementally add files to the outputFile. This means naming
outputFile as one of the inputFiles for the second through last
loops. You could add one page at a time to the outputFile or as many
as possible (per my above example), but I have found that adding one
page at a time to be much slower than adding as many as possible
through each iteration.
Does anyone know in which version of OS X the "Combine PDF pages"
Automator action was introduced?
Theoretically, the free pdftk PDF tool would allow RunRev Windows
apps to do this, also. I will be trying that out once my OS X app is
completed.
Regards,
Bruce Pokras
Blazing Dawn Software
www.blazingdawn.com
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