Last week simdude was showing how to combine multiple PDFs into one document using Mail. You can carry out the same action in Appleworks and Microsoft Word. The trouble is that only single page docs can be dealt with in this way. A bit laborious! And the process can't deal with multi-page docs.
As was explained on the same thread, there is a utility called joinPDF that will handle any number of files to be joined together. The trouble with this util is that it is command line only, and unwieldy for a large number of small size files. There is a bolt-on GUI (joinPDF GUI) available, and this works well but only allows two files at a time to be stuck together. I scan a lot of documents, and have a lot of single- and two-page PDFs to stick together, so I decided to write an Applescript droplet to automate the process, using joinPDF to do the actual sticking together. It's not pretty, but it will do until the author of the GUI can be persuaded to allow multiple file selections to be made.
[robg adds: Rather than pasting the somewhat long AppleScript here, I made it available for download from macosxhints: CombinePDF.sit.]
Select the appropriate files and drop onto the script icon. The script requests an output file name, checks to see if it exists, declares an error if it does, and gives the user the opportunity to enter another name. Because the command line uses UNIX syntax, much of the script is concerned with converting from MAC OS X format to Unix. Potentially a large number of file names might need converting, so there are subroutines to handle the necessary conversions. I've tried to write these to be reusable as possible. Terminal is used to send the assembled command line script to UNIX. For some reason, I could not get Terminal to exit normally. So the script does not quit Terminal, and any user will have to quit Terminal themselves. Any advice on how to deal with this gratefully received.
Best to place the files to be stuck together in the same directory. Select the files in the order in which they should be joined, and the script gets it right. Finally, the joinPDF routine runs quite slowly for big files, so don't assume that the routine has hung up. Give it a chance!
Mac OS X Hints
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20030602175355801