Combining PDFs with Automator

I have a Canon PIXMA MP470 device. It’s a decent printer that doubles as a scanner. The device is perfect for my needs although I would argue that it eats printer ink a little faster than I’d like. Then again, I got it for free, so I can’t complain too much (well if you don’t calculate the long term cost of printer ink over time).

In the past, I used proprietary software that came with the device to scan documents. For printing support, I could easily detect and attach to the printer via Bonjour (as the device is plugged into an Apple Airport so all machines on the network can use it). In the case of scanning, I would have to attach the USB cable directly to my computer. There might be a way to do this via Bonjour but that eludes me at the moment.

Recently, I upgraded to Snow Leopard and discovered that I could scan documents using the native Image Capture application. Perhaps, you could do this in Leopard too? Anyway, this allowed me to no longer require installing Canon’s proprietary printer/scanner software. The only downside is that the Image Capture application doesn’t know how to combine multiple document scans into one PDF. Nor does the Preview application allow one to combine multiple PDFs into one PDF document either. Bummer.

The solution is to use Automator. I generally use Automator for quick image manipulation, resizing, etc but it also has decent PDF support. In my case, where I have several PDF files from multiple scans of a single document, I can use Automator to combine all these PDFs into one file. As part of Apple’s Automator action library, someone has already built an Automator worklfow that does exactly this. You can download the workflow and use it to combine multiple PDF files into one.

Something to think about if you are in a situation like this. It definitely does the trick for me.

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