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Help Desk

by Rob Griffiths, Macworld.com

Check It Out: Merge PDFs into One Documnet

If you have a folder full of single-page PDFs—say, a collection of your favorite recipes—that you’d like to make into one large document, Apple’s Preview app can’t help you. But TextEdit offers an easy way to do the job. Launch the app and make sure you’ve got a blank window to work with (File: New). Next, make sure you’re working with a Rich Text Format (RTF) document by selecting Format: Make Rich Text. Switch back to the Finder and open the folder containing your PDFs. If you’d like them in a certain order, drag and drop them one at a time onto the TextEdit window. But if you have a series of PDFs in numerical or some other order, set your PDF folder to View: As Columns, and then select all the PDFs in the folder (Command-A). Drag and drop them into TextEdit, and they’ll flow in the order in which they appear in the column-view window (See screenshot).

Once you’ve combined everything in the TextEdit document, select File: Print. Then click on the Save As PDF button, give the file a new name, and click on the Save button. To pull off the trick of combining a number of multipage PDFs, you’ll need a third-party tool; check out MonkeyBread Software’s free Combine PDFs, an application that makes combining single and multipage PDFs a snap.

Unix Tip of the Month: Scale Graphics and More in Terminal

There are tons of Mac OS X-compatible tools for manipulating graphics, from the top-of-the-line Adobe Photoshop to Lemke Software’s much simpler Graphic Converter—but sometimes these tools are overkill for the task at hand. For instance, if you simply want to scale a folder of images down to 120 pixels wide for the Web, you could launch Photoshop, go into batch-processing mode, and get the job done. However, there’s an even quicker alternative—take advantage of Unix’s

sips

(scriptable image processing system) command. Open Terminal, change to the directory containing the images (type

cd

and a space, and then drag the image folder into Terminal and press enter), type

sips --resampleWidth 120 *.jpg

, and press enter. Want to flip an image horizontally? Try

	sips --flipHorizontal
	file name
	

. Rotate a picture 235 degrees clockwise? Type

	sips --rotate 235
	file name
	

. Convert a TIFF to a normal-quality JPEG? Use

sips --setProperty format jpeg --setProperty formatOptions normal input_file.tif --out output_file.jpg

.

There’s much, much more you can do with sips; to learn about it, type

sips --help

and

sips -H

in Terminal.

Joining a series of one-page PDFs is easy—just create a new TextEdit document and then drag and drop your files from the Finder.