Tag Archives: OS X Preview

How to merge PDFs in Apple’s Preview–and get them to stay merged

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My Monday was some 10 minutes shorter than it should have been. That’s about the time I wasted trying to get Apple’s Preview app to function as advertised to merge two Portable Document Format files into one PDF.

In the interest of sparing you the same aggravation, here’s what you need to do that Apple fails to clarify:

• Open one PDF in Preview, then drag the other PDF from the Finder into that window. Apple’s online help is correct through this step.

• Do not try to save the combined PDF. Do not use the File menu’s “Export as PDF…” command. Both will leave you with a document consisting only of the first PDF.

• Instead, go to the File menu, select “Print…” and then click the downward-facing button next to “PDF” at the lower-left corner. Select “Save as PDF…” and you will have your combined PDF file.

Dear Apple: When I gripe about the state of software quality on the Mac these days, it’s things like this that usually set me off. Here we have a completely unintuitive process in which the correct way to do things sits three clicks deep in the app’s UI–and two clicks further in than the menu options that look like they’d do the job. And I know I’m not the only user irked by it.

Please fix this–although if you must prioritize, restore memory discipline to Safari first.

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Weekly output: “right to be forgotten” (x2), Facebook privacy, travel bags, Pandora, Tech Night Owl, downloading Flickr and Facebook photos

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Two things I’d written a while back–weeks ago in one case, last year in the other–made their appearance this week.

5/20/2014: The ‘Right to be Forgotten’: A Right to Endless Argument, Yahoo Tech

In this week’s column, I tried to untangle the logic behind a European court’s ruling that EU citizens can petition search engines to have unflattering links not be shown in queries for their names.

5/20/2014: How to See Yourself as the Web Sees You: 5 Tips, Yahoo Tech

To go with that column, I wrote a short sidebar about how to check up on the picture of you that search engines and Facebook present to strangers.

5/22/2014: Facebook privacy, WTOP

The news station interviewed me about Facebook’s unprecedented but welcome move to less-public default settings. As I said on the air: With this change, it’s definitely not throwback Thursday at Facebook HQ.

5/23/2014: Nerd Bags: How 5 Yahoo Tech Writers Keep It All Together, Yahoo Tech

Read on to see what kind of bags I and four Yahoo Tech colleagues–Rafe Needleman, Rob Walker, Alyssa Bereznak, and Dan Tynan–use when we travel for business.

Boing Boing Pandora post5/24/2014: Pandora’s “Music Genome Project” explores the cold hard facts of how we interact with music, Boing Boing

This story had an exceptionally prolonged gestation: I waited way too long to file the thing, and then my editor wanted to hold off running it until the site could launch its redesign. That redesign, in turn, took months longer than expected (I don’t know the details, nor do I want to know the details). There are a couple of references in the piece that show its age–for example, iTunes Radio is no longer an “upcoming” product–and should be fixed soon.

5/24/2014: May 24, 2014 — Dorothy Pomerantz, Daniel Eran Dilger and Rob Pegoraro, Tech Night Owl

I talked about the right-to-be-forgotten ruling, AT&T’s proposal to buy DirecTV, and Apple’s “never mind” settlement of a patent suit against Google on Gene Steinberg’s podcast.

5/25/2014: Grab it: Download photos in bulk from Flickr, Facebook, USA Today

I was unpleasantly surprised by the poor quality of the apps I tried for downloading multiple photos from Flickr and Facebook. (Hint: Adobe Flash is not a good middleware layer to build an app on these days.) The tip part of the column suggests that readers take another look at OS X’s Preview utility and the Paint app in Windows for basic image editing.