Q: Yosemite: Preview Won't Manipulate or Merge PDFs
-
Jan 25, 2015 8:55 AMby Litag8r,Well as much as I love being told that the problem I have been having problems with is not a bug and I just need to try it again, I decided to take a more scientific approach to my problem to see if I was crazy. Turns out, I'm not.
My hypothesis was that since combining PDFs works for some people and not others, there might be something different about the PDF documents they are using to test functionality. Said differently, perhaps not all PDFs are created equally since we all appear to be using the same software. After all, some scanned documents have an OCR layer and some do not. Some PDFs appear to have identical content yet one take up a tiny amount of disc space and the other takes up a huge amout. (This is something identified earlier in this string by someone else.) Therefore I identified three "types" of PDFs and tried to combine PDFs that were (1) generated directly from Word, (2) scanned from my scanner, and (3) scanned from another scanner and annotated using Preview. I tried to combine all three "types" of PDFs with all three types (9 possible combinations). Note that I did not even try locked PDFs. I will also note that the PDFs where chosen at random from the thousands that I routinely use in my work. The generated document was only 1 page long. The scanned document was 156 pages long. The annotated document was 18 pages long.
The result is that if I drag to combine a generated (or clean) PDF INTO any other type of PDF it works just like it used to before Yosemite. The generated PDF is added to the original PDF. However it is impossible for me to drag to combine ANY of the other two types of documents to combine them.
Preview does, however, open, print, split (drag pages out to create a new PDF), reorder pages, and delete pages just fine. Therefore my conclusion is that only feature that seems to have a bug is combining PDF documents when the document to be added to the other is NOT a virgin, clean, computer-generated PDF.
I would like to see if anyone else can replicate this same bug, or if the 26 or so people who have reported the same problem just have a "unique" system problem.
Some folks have devised some work-arounds to the problem. However, I combine PDFs daily, and I don't need a more complicated or time-consuming method to combine PDFs. I routinely combine a dozen or more documents into one PDF. I have been using Adobe Acrobat to combine PDFs, but am considering PDFPenPro from Smile Software as my default PDF program. Adobe is slow, laggy, and ponderous in operation, and often the combine PDF operation crashes the program. I would prefer that Preview just do its job, however.
My testing was conducted using Yosemite 10.10.1 and preview 8.0 on 1-25-15.
-
-
Jan 26, 2015 9:10 AMby SamuelBTL,Litag8r,
If you would like an objective (and more scientific) approach, I believe it would be necessary for everyone to test with the same reference PDFs.
I have personally combined documents of "type 1" and "type 2" together in all possible combinations. Admittedly, I have not tried to combine documents of "type 3".
It is conceivable, however, that different scanners use different standards for PDF creation. This would cause "type 2" documents to differ from person to person.
-
Jan 26, 2015 9:13 AMby Gregg Palmer,The fact is that Preview is buggy and needs some attention. How the PDF is created or from which program should be irrelevant. PDF's should be easily combined and manipulated just like in prior versions of Preview...the trick here is to keep the discussion going so that Apple knows that there is an issue...
-
Jan 26, 2015 11:54 AMby G.Lenn,Same issue
- Multiple reboots did not work
- PDFpenpro did not work
- No updates shown on App Store
Oddly enough what worked for me is a full shutdown of my MacBook. When it booted back up, there was a weird installation bar that showed up after I entered my password. It had no indication of what it was installing.
But, now everything works.
-
Feb 2, 2015 10:47 AMby powerhall,I have had the same issues. I use the PDF merge feature constantly in my work, and this has reduced my productivity enormously. I have done extensive testing, and often I can merge one or two pages, then will be unable to merge the next one. It does not seem to be file-type specific, but seems to have more to do with how many times you have used the merge command while Preview is open. The Apple Genius reproduced the problem and verified that it is specific to the latest version of Yosemite. I encourage EVERYONE to go to the Apple Feedback site and complain as loudly as possible to get this higher in their queue of fixes. Thank you to everyone who takes the time to do so! This is important!
-
Feb 12, 2015 2:56 PMby e rose,This was VERY frustrating, but the solution found at http://macosxautomation.com/automator/combinePDFs/index.html worked perfectly for me. NOTE: you don't have to create it all yourself using the very lengthy instructions. Just download the service and install it.
Worked like a charm!
The zip file they posted is at:
http://macosxautomation.com/automator/combinePDFs/CombinePDFService.zip
-
Feb 13, 2015 12:48 PMby Pseudotechie,Litag8r,
Thank you for doing such a thorough test. I've been having the same issue as everyone else, in my case trying to insert a one-page scanned PDF into a multi-page generated PDF. Printing the scanned PDF to a PDF didn't help. Here's what did (which may be similar to an earlier suggestion to highlight the various PDFs and open them at the same time):
• First (in Thumbnail View in both docs), I dragged the scanned PDF into the generated PDF. Of course, the scanned PDF just laid on top of the generated PDF in the sidebar; I couldn't move it to the generated PDF, because they were really two separate docs, just sitting in the same sidebar.
• I clicked on a page in the *generated* PDF, highlighting it.
• I highlighted all of the pages in the sidebar with Ctrl A.
• I opened the Print dialogue and selected Open PDF in Preview from the PDF dropdown, which I then saved. ("Save as PDF..." might have worked as well, saving a step.)
• I then closed all docs and opened the newly saved PDF, which contained all of the pages from both docs; at that point I was able to manipulate them in the usual way, moving the page from the scanned PDF — now the first page of the new doc — to a different location.
• I yelled, "Finally!"
Note that Print, Save as PDF didn't work for me when I did it just to the scanned doc, attempting to "flatten" it before attempting to insert it into the generated doc. It only worked when I had the two docs together in the same sidebar.
I hope this works for others. It's certainly a workaround, but it doesn't take long. If you find that you're having the merge problem, then you already have both docs open and you're almost halfway there.
-
Feb 19, 2015 8:38 AMby Litag8r,Thanks e rose for the link to the Automator service that I have been using to combine PDFs without a problem. VikingOSX correctly stated that the combine PDF service works. Since Yosemite, however, the only Automator script I use started working erratically (and sometimes not at all). This Automator problem has been reported on other threads, and one learned commenter says that something inside OSX appears to be broken causing these erratic results. Thus I was skeptical that Automator would work for me. However it does! Therefore I don't have to rush out to buy another program to combine PDFs today.
Here is a link to the zip file so you don't have to go looking up this thread to find it:
http://macosxautomation.com/automator/combinePDFs/CombinePDFService.zip
To use, just select each PDF you want to combine (must be inside the same folder) in the order you want to combine them. Then right-click on one, select service->combine PDF. It takes just a few seconds to combine some 200+ page documents. Haven't had a failure yet.
Thanks also for the clever workaround by Pseudotechie! I tried it with a scanned file and a generated file with annotations just now and it worked fine. Check out his post above for that tip as well if you are not comfortable with Automator. As Pseudotechie says, if you have preview open with the documents then you are half way to a solution.
Nevertheless, this not only does not excuse Preview from its dumb bug(s), but makes it even more perplexing. The OS comes with a service that will combine PDFs, and Automator can access that service. Therefore why can't Preview pull it off like it used to? I think we all just want Preview to return to its previous functionality. It is small, fast, and does 90% of what you need Adobe Acrobat for. I never knew how great it was until it was broken.
As an aside, it is really remarkable that (1) not everyone is having this problem, but those of us that do can reproduce it readily and (2) that we have a forum like this filled with geniuses who seem to be able to find a solution for every problem! Preview may not be fixed, and this problem not "solved" but we have at least 2 solutions that you can implement in minutes that will get you back on the road! Thanks!!!!
-
Feb 24, 2015 7:52 AMby ksnair,Here is another way to do this.
Step 1: Open only the first PDF file in Preview.
Step 2: Open a Finder window and keep it side by side with the Preview window
Step 3: View > Thumbnails is on
Step 4: Drag the second PDF file from the "Finder" window to the Thumbnail section of the Preview app
Step 5. Export to PDF
This worked for me. Also, I merged a JPEG file into this document the same way and it seemed to work. Hope this helps. Apple definitely didn't document this anywhere of course, I tried it on a whim.
