Yosemite: Preview Won't Manipulate or Merge PDFs

VikingOSX

Just a heads up Viking. If you go to help and search for Combine PDF or Comb for short, there is a help article showing you how to combine a pdf. Do NOT be so quick to defend a 'bug'. I suggest you do your homework next time before you decide to school users on what Apple does and does not intend to do.

Yes this is a bug, how do we know? There is a help article page built into OS 10.10 on how to do it, and following those instructions had no affect on combining a pdf.

Thanks for this post. I too expect this to work in Yosemite. I do think it has something to do with annotated documents, however this should be an easy problem to resolve, especially since they just updated the 'how to' doc for this exact tool less than two weeks ago. Come Apple, fix what's broke.

I am not sure that I caught the same "annotated" variable. I have two screen shots that I am working with. Nothing special about these screenshots, other than they are .png files.

I had exactly the same problem with the first PDF's I tried to manipulate after upgrade to Yosemite.

What I have found is that if the PDF which won't manipulate is 'exported' using preview the resulting PDF file then can be manipulated & pages moved/ merged between documents just as as before the upgrade to Yosemite. A bit cumbersome but worth trying.

Using late 2009 21 inch iMac, Yosemite and Preview 8.0. I can no longer merge PDF documents by drag and drop. Pre-Yosemite, it worked fine. It didn't matter if the PDF was created from a scanner or using Adobe. I use Preview for work and need a fix for this.

I am also having this problem. When opening several JPGs from a scanned document in Preview, I was previously able to drag one thumbnail on top of another in the left-hand sidebar of Preview to merge the two. I am still able to rearrange the files in the sidebar, but I am unable to merge them - i.e.: there is no green '+' button which I expect to appear when dragging one on top of the other.

Please fix!

This work-around is not a fix, but its got me back to work. Thanks for the tip. I found that any annotations that are made to the file become a permanent part of the file and non-editable after the export to PDF. Good thing to keep in mind if you need to go back an make further annotations. Thanks Ariel484

Has anyone else filed a bug report of this? I have but it would have more weight if others did also. Thank you.

I found a solution!!! & then made a video about to help others and myself later, should I forget. I am not the best writer either and explaining would be harder / not as effective as the video and needed an excuse to procrastinate studying for finals. IDK there is a bug just a little tricky to figure out.

http://youtu.be/UaItVHlaMRI

Thanks for the post but this method also does not work for me for the affected files.

I was able to merge 2 pdfs in preview by opening both of them then dragging the thumbnail pages of one into the other. Prior to Yosemite you could just drag the entire pdf document from your desktop into the thumbnails of an open pdf. Doesn't seem to work that easily anymore.

I think I found the solution to this latest Apple disaster.

The multi-page pdf files that you want to merge together have to be new “virgin” files. Here’s what worked for me:

Open both of the documents that you want to merge together.

Select "Command P” as if you were going to print them.

When the print dialog window opens, select “Open in PDF Preview” from the PDF drop down menu.

The copies that open can then be manipulated or merged in any way you want and it doesn’t matter if they have been previously annotated.

Seems like kind of a lame way of doing it, but it worked (for me anyways)... Hope this helps some of you out.

I have same problem. It doesn't seem to matter whether they were annotated or not. One merged and the next wouldn't. Now none of them merge. Not consistent and not as good as it should be. Please fix Apple. In addition, preview doesn't even seem to allow moving order of pages around in thumbnails as used to be a functionality.