Working w/PDFs Via the Command Line

"pdfjoin", part of the PDFjam (http://www.warwick.ac.uk/go/pdfjam) utilities, sounds useful.

If you do have TeX lots of pdf-related tasks are really easy. (If you don't there's now an all-in-one mega-installer called "mactex" that looks like a great idea: just press *go*, instead of the fairly laborious i-Installer based routine that you used to have to endure. See

http://www.tug.org/mactex/

and not that I'm not joking about "mega".) Anyway, given that...

To simply concatenate a bunch of pdf files /tout court/ you can use a one-liner...

% texexec --pdfarrange --result all.pdf file*.pdf

(or even using ghostscript

% gs -q -sPAPERSIZE=a4 -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOutputFile=output.pdf *.pdf

)

If you want more control over importing certain pages you can use the pdfpages package in latex; just run the following through latex:


\documentclass[letter]{article}
\usepackage{pdfpages}
\begin{document}
\includepdf[pages=5]{me.pdf}
\includepdf[pages={12-14}]{you.pdf}
\includepdf[pages=4-8,12-14]{dog.pdf}
\includepdf[pages=1-]{boo.pdf}
\end{document}

That'll give you the obvious pages from the four pdf files: page 5 only from me.pdf, pages 12-14 from you.pdf, pages 4-8 and 12-14 from dog.pdf and all pages from boo.pdf.

pdfpages can handle rotations as well, and Graphic Converter (for example) can turn the first page of a pdf into a jpg without even raising a sweat: so, I'm sure, can lots of other apps.

Cheers,
Paul