MacOS 12.3 (Monterey) Automator Combine PDF Pages breaks workflows

I have done more experimentation and you can remove the Get Specified Finder Items action. Just add these two new lines to the AppleScript, and that will pass the merged.pdf full path to the Move Finder Items action.

	outpdf's writeToFile:merged_pdf
	delay 2
	return merged_pdf as text

This is really great! Is there a version of this code that I can use to interleave the two PDFs that I want to combine? This was a great feature of Automator that I used often (until it decided to break itself)???

Any guidance would be greatly appreciated.

No. There is no plan to entirely replicate the Python script functionality underlying that Automator action.

I am looking at the original join.py in that Automator action and it leans heavily on Quartz CoreGraphics which may in turn, make it problematic for implementing this shuffle functionality in AppleScript/Objective-C. No promises.

Ok. I sat down with Apple's join.py and looked at the code involved with the shuffle feature. Neither AppleScript/Objective-C nor JavaScript for Automation are being cooperative in the shuffle functionality migration and I have given up as it is consuming too much time. It might be possible in Objective-C or Swift, but that limits the user adaptation here.

When I try this script (or the similar Automator action) in Monterey 12.3 it fails with

nsurl of «script» doesn’t understand the “fileURLWithPath_” message.

Does anyone have any ideas why this is happening?

Hello,

I used VikingOSX’s script to automate the combining of all pdf's in a folder into a single file. It works perfectly.

How would you replace the "choose file" in the line below with the hardcoded path? Folder is "Macintosh HD/myusername/Dropbox/…".

set pdfList to (choose file with prompt msg of type {"com.adobe.pdf"} default location (path to desktop) with multiple selections allowed)

Please note that the list must remain sorted.

Thank you.

Thank you very much for your quick response.

What I would like is indeed to omit the choose file clause. (Since the path is known in my case, it is not necessary for me to select it every time I run the script).

But, as I have never written Applescript before, I don't know how to assign pdfList its hardcoded value. Besides, the list must be sorted alphabetically.

Please excuse my English which is not my native language.

Thank you.

Hi VikingOSX. (Are you Norwegian? If so, I am too...)

I have the same problem with Combine PDF dying because of Python going away, and I really think your script can be my solution too, but I need set the list of known pdf filenames (paths) in my order. (The PDF-files will be in a folder with all kinds of different files...)

I'm not any good in AppleScript, and this is the best I have soo far;

# tilde path to absolute path
set merged_pdf to (NSString's stringWithString:"~/Desktop/merged.pdf")'s stringByStandardizingPath()

# me trying to hardcode the list the 3 PDFs I want to merge. Where the _p1.pdf is page 1
set pdfList to {"~/Desktop/PreAdvise_200436_p1.pdf", "~/Desktop/PreAdvise_200436_a1.pdf", "~/Desktop/PreAdvise_200436_a2.pdf"}


set outurl to NSURL's fileURLWithPath:(POSIX path of (item 1 of pdfList))
set outpdf to PDFDocument's alloc()'s initWithURL:outurl
set pdfList to rest of pdfList
set lastPage to outpdf's pageCount()

but this gives me this error at pageCount:

error "missing value doesn’t understand the “pageCount” message." number -1708 from missing value

So I guess I'm way off in manually setting "pdfList" with my list of paths to get something AppleScripts understands.

If you know how I should format the "set pdfList to"-line to x number of paths to known PDFs - so the rest of your script understand - I would appreciate that very much.

Great. It worked!

Then I was closer that I thought.

Thanks!

*For anybody wandering what the full UNIX path of a file is - as I needed a couple of tries - this is it:

"/Users/<you user shortname>/<folder name>/<filename with extension>"

Hello,

You are right: the Quick action can be used in most cases.

However, as far as I am concerned, I use Viking OSX's AppleScript almost daily in an Automator workflow. 'Combine PDFs' comes after other automated processes and is launched in turn in different folders.

So it is very convenient for me to be able to launch all these processes in just one click.

Best Regards.

I purposely built a solution that does not change the original PDF but rather writes the combined PDF documents to a separate named output PDF. That avoids any "accidents" that alter the contents of the first selected PDF, especially if it was not backed up to Time Machine.

The AppleScript editor (Script Editor) is in the /Applications/Utilities folder, or Dock > Launchpad > Other.

There are extra coding considerations when adapting an AppleScript for use in Automator.

Hi VikingOSX, I have used your script to create a working "Combine PDFs" Quick Action, but no matter how I select the source files using Command-Key to select the originals in the correct order, the resultant PDF has pages in the same order as they are sorted in the finder. Please advise if you can.

How can I return the generated PDF in automator to use the result in a "Move Finder Items" action?