to combine PDFs at a fairly crude level, i just drop them on TextEdit in the order desired, and save as PDF

for more control over the ouput, and high-quality results, i place the PDFs on pages in an InDesign layout, then export as PDF.. (one can only place these on a page one at a time manually, but there are AppleScripts to automate placing multi-page PDFs)

How does this accomplish anything? If you drop 3 separate PDFs on TextEdit, you get 3 different documents opened in TextEdit. Nothing is combined. What's the point of this?

Oh, I see. IF you have TextEdit set to RTF document; and if you are NOT dropping from the desktop, then you can drop files into TextEdit and it will work.

I'm missing something here.

If I drag and drop from the Finder to TextEdit in the dock, my PDF opens as text even though my TextEdit default is RTF.

If I drag and drop from the Finder to a TextEdit document window I get the PDF icon in my document.

Where are you guys dragging from and to?