A long time ago I produced some brochures for a client, big A4 triple page things (the brochure not the client, ahahaha!). Recently the client has asked for PDF versions of them to be put on their website. I sort of kept putting this off as I don’t really have much to do with PDF’s and I figured it would be a headache, but finally the deadline for the preliminary versions arrived.

Exporting to PDF. The original artwork was done in Xara, and thankfully a new version has been released with excellent PDF export. This meant getting the documents into a suitable format required just an export from Xara.

However, as expected the PDFs produced were way to big for sensible distribution, and each side of each brochure was a seperate PDF.

As PDF support is built into OS X at a system level it turned out fixing both of these issues was so simple it was almost criminal.

Compression – load each PDF into Apple’s Preview application and just choose the ‘reduce file size’ option from the ‘save as’ window. Sweet.

Now to combine them. There are plenty of Automator actions to do this, but there are also several apps. A quick search on Google and I found Combine PDFs. Run it, drop the PDFs into the window, drag them around to arrange the page order and click ‘merge’. Done.

Update – this little app will also combine image files into a PDF, eg a folder full of JPG’s.

And if you want to be smart you could probably put together an Automator action (in less than 5 mins) to do both steps in one go.

You gotta love Mac’s. I genuinely just don’t get why people use Windows PCs, doesn’t make any sense to me.

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