What I do for small sets in such cases is exactly what you suggested.
What I've ended up doing in this case is create an Automator workflow. As others are probably trying to do the same thing, I'll post my solution below. Note that this will only work on OS X 10.5 and later.
Step 1: Download the "Dispense Items Incrementally" automator action (this is the piece I was missing before).
Step 2: Create a new workflow. You can either create an Application, or a service.
Step 3: Insert the Dispense Items Incrementally action
Step 4: Insert a Set Value of Variable action, and name your variable appropriately
Step 5: Insert a Run AppleScript action and include the following text:
on run {input, parameters}
tell application "System Events"
return name of (input as alias)
end tell
end run
Step 6: Insert a Set Value of Variable action, and name it differently from the previous one.
Step 7: Insert a Get Value of Variable action, and select the first variable name
Step 8: Insert a Get Folder Contents action
Step 9: Insert a Combine PDF Pages action
Step 10: Insert a Move Finder Items action, and choose an appropriate place to save the merged items
Step 11: Insert a Name Single Item action, and name appropriately, using the second variable you created in the name
Step 12: Insert a Loop action, loop automatically. I set "stop after" to 999 minutes, just so it would have a fail limit (it will stop as soon as it runs out of items).
Save the automator workflow, and then drop the folders containing the items onto it (or select and right click the folders and select the services action if you created a service). Voila! The combine is VERY fast, compared to the Adobe version -- but the result isn't as compressed (about 1MB larger for most large PDFs I created).
After this, you can create an acrobat action to reduce file size if you want, and drag all your freshly created PDFs onto that item -- depending on the settings you set, you can strip out the superfluous markup, or add extra compl\ression (the more recent version you set for compatibility, the smaller the file will be, but the newer the reader you'll have to use to open it -- I find Adobe 6 is usually a good setting, some may prefer 4 if they have older PDF handlers in their workflow, or even 10 if it's only going to be used with a recent version).
Message was edited by: ludgates (fixed typo)
