Hello, I have a Mac OSX v10.6.8 Snow leopard with Office for Mac.

You didn't mention what scanner you're using, or the software used to scan from it; that would be much more helpful.

If you have separate PDFs, you can use CombinePDFs to merge them all into one file, in the page order you want; anyone you send that to should be able to scroll through it from top to bottom without any problem.

As for the selecting text problem, what software are you using when you try to do this? If you only have Preview, try downloading Adobe Reader and see if that works, or even Skimand test that, too.

Yes, QuickLook is a "feature" of Mac OS X.

Combine PDFs is an application that does exactly what it's name implies: combine multiple PDFs into one document. It's very simple to use, and it's donationware for the current version; that is, you can combine up to 1000 pages for free before they ask you to make a donation to keep improving the program and supporting it. If you click on the link I provided in my previous post, it will take you directly to the web site where you can download it.

Same thing with Skim; it's another PDF reader, with some additional features. So you can open any PDF you download, create, or receive via email with it, instead of having to use Preview, QuickLook, or even Adobe Reader.

rarmy wrote:

Any advice gratefully received!

You when ask a question, give it a short and relevant title, be specific, provide technical details. At a minimum, give your version of the operating system, and the version of the software you're using.

I have only recently changed to a Mac from a PC and I only find these things out as I need to use them

You're setting up yourself for headaches and wasted time. Even if similar to Win in a lot of respects, Mac OS X is not Win. Spending at least 10 minutes now to acquire at least a basic understanding of what you're doing will save you many hours of fumbling about without achieving what you need. At the very least, read

<http://support.apple.com/kb/HT2514>

and get yourself a book on Mac OS X.

Im not sure what software is used - I assumed it was that for the printer/scanner.

Find out. You may be using HP software, or you may be using Image Capture or Preview (applications provided with Mac OS X).

If I want to try and merge the scanned pages […] It then comes up from Mac finder on something called Preview

You can merge PDFs in Preview. You don't need any other software.

Once you are finished scanning, open the first PDF. Choose Edit > Insert Blank Page. Then, if the Sidebar isn't showing, press ⇧⌘D, or choose View > Sidebar > Show Sidebar. If the Sidebar isn't showing Thumbnails, press ⌥⌘2, or choose Thumbnails from the same sub-menu.

Then switch to Finder, select the other PDFs you created by scanning, and drag them to Preview's Sidebar. You should now have a PDF document in Preview including all your scans. You can re-arrange the order by dragging thumbnails in Preview. Once that is done, save.

you can hightlight from Text to copy and paste into a Word document, or create a graphic copy from Select.

You can select text in Preview if you have text. PDF may contain text and/or images. In your case, it contains only images, because that's what you scanned. To obtain text, you have to put the scanned image through an Optical Character Recognition programme. Preview doesn't do that. Your scanner's software may include OCR facilities; you need to consult its manual or user guide or help files to find out if it does and how to use it.

rarmy wrote:

no matter what I do when I drag PDFs to the side bar to merge them to one document, like you say, they stubornly go into reverse order

AFAICT, the order in which they are inserted depends on the sorting in Finder. So check, first, the file names, second, their sorting order in Finder.

Im not sure quite what receipients are doing but I get responses that they only have a last page and then cannot scroll back up thorough the document to find the earlier pages.

Can't say anything to that -- it is certainly not some familiar bug. If you can post such a file online, then maybe someone can have a look at it and see if it's alright.

the document I wanted to copy was a scanned text document and there were no images.

When you scan anything, be it a photo, a page in a book, or a newspaper, you produce an image. It's the equivalent of taking a picture (btw, that's why in Mac OS X Image Capture handles both cameras and scanners). You do not generate text. In order to get text from an image, you need to process it through OCR. On Mac, Win, or anything else, there is no other way. In fact, the same process occurs when you read a page of printed text, except that the OCR takes place in your brain. The fact that the image is embedded in a PDF document doesn't change anything. The picture is not magically transmogrified into text just because it's saved as PDF. I should be very surprised if this were not explained in the user guides which came with your scanner or with the software bundled with the scanner.

rarmy wrote:

I was working from a position of my work PC - for some reason and Im not sure what- I could copy and paste a pdf text document straight into a Word document

Probably you were using Adobe Acrobat Pro. There are three "document" presets, and all have OCR enabled by default. Acrobat Pro is also available for Mac OS X, but it's not cheap.