Q: Can I collate two .pdf files with multiple odd/even pages?

You will need Adobe Acrobat Pro, or another PDF editor that allows you to manually reorder thumbnails. Pages sure won't do this, as it is not a PDF editor.

You can easily do this with Preview.app

Open both documents side by side and display their Thumbnails. Now you can simply drag-and-drop pages from one document to the other inserting the dragged page thumbnail between the proper destination document thumbnails. I think this is a pretty fast thing to do in your case. The trick is to work with the thumbnails, not the document content.

Hope this helps

---markus---

Hi,

It's possible with an Automator workflow:

Open the Automator application.

Make an workflow like this:

Important:

The order of the PDF files in the "Get Specified Items" action:

The PDF file which contains odd pages should be in the first row.

The PDF file which contains even pages should be in the second row.

edited: the order of the PDF files in my first image is not correct.

You must check the "Shuffling pages" case in the "Combine PDF Pages" action

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If you want an workflow that puts the PDF files to the trash and rename and move the new PDF file to the same folder as the original PDF file, make an workflow like this:

Insert the variable named "Stockage" to this workflow

Here's the script to put in the "Run AppleScript" action

on run {input, parameters}
    set newPDF_path to item 1 of input -- the combined PDF
    set tName to name of (info for (item 2 of input))
    tell application "Finder"
        set parentFolder to container of (item 2 of input)
        delete items 2 thru 3 of input -- move the original PDF files to trash
        move newPDF_path to parentFolder -- move the combined PDF file to the same folder
        set name of newPDF_path to tName -- rename the combined PDF file to the name of document which contains the odd pages
    end tell
    return newPDF_path
end run

This worked perfectly and simply. The most sane and easy to implement of all the options I've found after an hour of googling and trying.