Automator Action: Print PDF

Hi, I’m not a programmer, just someone who’s perplexed to find himself in the position he’s in with a mature Mac OS. I’m looking for a Print PDF action, which I don’t think currently exists. Read on to find out why.

In previous iterations of Mac OS X if you double-clicked on multiple selected PDFs Preview.app would open them all in one window, then you could set page size and print them all with one print command. This was extremely useful for us as architects because we routinely want to print multple A1 size PDFs, often scaling them down to A3 too.

For whatever reason Apple appears to have removed this capability from Preview.app (although it still remains for images), and now I’ve finally got round to looking for an alternative solution; it can be very tedious to set page size and click print for every single PDF each time you want to print a set.

We’d prefer not to have to worry about setting the page size in System Preferences either and we don’t want to combine the PDFs as we need to file them as seperate files.

So, I had it suggested to me that Automator might be the way to go, but there is no Print PDF action. There’s only Print Finder Items (which doesn’t allow for setting page size or scaling to fit page) and Print Images (which won’t print PDFs and doesn’t allow for setting page size).

So the Print Images action is pretty close to what we need. All it needs to be able to do extra is set page size and print PDFs. What are the chances of someone whipping something like this up, or are Automator actions not that simple?

Any other ideas? Thanks.