Having spent some time searching the internet on how to do this with Automator I ended up trying to write my own in Applescript. More searching on how to do this and I stumbled onto this beautiful script from kenhotto, who has already done exactly what I was trying to do.
--Select from where you will pick up the pages files
set theFolder to choose folder with prompt "Select folder with original pages files :"
--Do it
tell application "Finder"
set theNames to name of files of theFolder ¬
whose name extension is "pages"
end tell
--Select where the PDF files will go
set pdf_Folder to choose folder with prompt "Select folder where PDF files will go :"
-- How many files to export
set item_count to (get count of items in theNames)
--Get files and export them
repeat with i from 1 to item_count
set current_file to itemi of theNames-- get a file
set lean_file to text 1 thru -7 of current_file & ".pdf" -- change the originalfile (.pages) to a .pdf name
set out_file to (pdf_Folder as Unicode text) & (lean_file) -- get the fully qualified output name
set in_file to (theFolder as Unicode text) & (current_file) -- get the fully qualified input file name
tell application "Pages"
set mydoc to openfilein_file-- open input file in Pages
exportmydoctofileout_fileasPDF--do the exporting
closemydocsavingno-- close the original file without saving
end tell
end repeat
display dialog "done" -- Job done
We are constantly adding new pages documents to the folder I wanted to convert to PDF and so I tried re-running the programme on the already processed folders with the result that it simply adds the unconverted pages files to the existing folder of PDF's. It takes a bit of time and I'm sure there's a clever 'if clause' that will mean the programme doesn't even look at the already converted files, but this works for me. Problem solved. Thanks to kenhotto and everyone else for their input.
