I am hoping someone can offer a solution to a challenge in using Adobe Quick Action “Save as Adbobe PDF”.
I am looking to print to PDF hundreds of files in a folder. At the moment, I select the files and then right click to select the Quick Action “Save as Adbove PDF”. This works fine, EXCEPT, that each file produces a save dialog requiring me to manually hit “Save” for each file.
Can anyone suggest a way to script around this issue? I am looking to have the hundreds of files save to Adobe PDF without my having to manually wait around and click “Save” hundreds of times.
kiwilegal. My computer doesn’t have a “Save as Adobe PDF” quick action, so I can’t help with that. FWIW, I’ve included below a shortcut that otherwise does what you want. A few comments:
macOS Monterey or newer is required.
The following screenshot only shows the first portion of the shortcut.
To test the shortcut, simply download and install, and the shortcut will be shown in both the quick action and services menus.
You may need to edit the list action to reflect input-file formats.
Existing target files will not be overwritten, but that is easily changed.
Thank you both, and particularly peavine. I have never used Shortcuts before so this was all new to me. But it works brilliantly.
I have adapted the Shortcut to only accept PDF files, and to overwrite the original files.
I have renamed the Shortcut “Flatten PDF” and added a notification to say when it has finished.
It is very quick and retains the colour/orientation/rotation of the originals. It also seems to produce mostly smaller files.
The only thing that seems to slow it down is that it asks for permission to access the folders in which I select the PDFs to flatten, requiring manual input/confirmation for that. When I select multiple files in multiple folders, this is a bit annoying as it will prompt and ask permission for access to each folder. If there is anything that can be scripted to avoid this permission requesting, that would be good.
kiwilegal. I’m glad that worked as you wanted. The shortcut remembers the folders you have approved and stops asking after a while. In the interim, it is an annoyance.
…could I ask one other question. I see you have used the “Make PDF from” function. Is it possible to use the “Print” function to create a new PDF? From what I can see, it accepts a PDF as an input and the result can also be a PDF. I just cannot seem to get this to function.
I ask this because the “Make PDF from” seems to keep all comments/highlights etc in the original PDF. I would ideally like the result to flatten all these, which printing should do. The result should ideally be a wholly flattened version of the original PDF.
Curiously, the “Make PDF from” flattens any watermark in the PDF, making the watermark non-editable. But comments/highlights etc remain editable.
kiwilegal. Flattening a PDF is not a topic that I know much about, but one option is to rasterize the PDF. I posted a shortcut that will rasterize a multi-page PDF in the Shortcuts forum:
If you google “flatten pdf online” there are several services come up. I don’t know if they do exactly what you need and if they will do batch conversion for free but it may worth trying.
Thanks for this. I looked at all these bar VipRiser.
The Shortcuts way is much more elegant than Automator (I tried to use Automator without success). Automator is anyway to be deprecated, I understand, in due course…in favour of Shortcuts.
I actually bought PDF Printer and have had a number of exchanges with the developer. Unfortunately, the driver “tampers” with the PDFs when batch processing, auto rotating (wrongly!) certain pages on a random basis and doing everything in portrait, not respecting landscape PDFs. So you get a bunch of PDF results that are NOT the same as the originals. So not a solution.
I tried BatchOutput PDF, but I have to say I found it difficult. Happy to give further feedback on PM but not a solution for me.
As I said, I have not tried VipRiser. But I think I will stop while I am ahead.
The elegance of the Shortcut solution from peavine (after small adjustments) is that it simply replaces all the PDFs leaving the folder structure intact. In Finder, I duplicate the head folder containing all the PDFs to ensure I have the originals intact. Then using Finder I point Shortcuts at all the PDFs in the duplicated head folder/subfolders and hit process. This embeds the Watermark in all the PDF pages. This is something you cannot easily do and which was the driver for me to explore solutions.
In Acrobat, I can quickly and easily apply a Watermark to multiple PDFs, but there was no way of embedding the watermark in all the documents. The Shortcut works really well and fast to do this. I then share the finished result with everyone without further ado. With the Shortcut, you end up with exactly the same folder structure and file names as in the original head folder. No further human moving around required.
No other solution I have seen is as quick and efficient as this. And reliably so, so far. My hope was that the Shortcut “Print” function might be incorporated to achieve a full “flattening” of the PDFs. But I suspect it would be much slower even if possible. So I will go with speed for now and the fact that the Watermark gets fully embedded in every PDF with the visual result and orientation of each PDF being otherwise faithfully maintained (so far as my tests to date are concerned anyway!).
kiwilegal. I thought I should mention one item that you may encounter.
Your shortcut contains a Save action, and the Overwrite if File Exists option is enabled. For some reason, on my Sonoma computer, a shortcut will not overwrite a file on an external drive and instead appears to do nothing. You may want to verify if this is an issue on your computer.
I am doing this all on a Macbook Pro internal root SSD. No problems there. I have not tested on an external drive - and should in principle not need to!
Oh yeah the Shortcuts solution offered by @peavine is the most elegant and efficient of all offered. Hopefully flattening can be eventually incorporated there one way or another. I’ll send you PM regarding BatchOutput PDF.
