I’ve just been playing around creating some eps files with gnuplot, and have subsequently had to convert them to PDFs for someone else to view. Turns out I wasn’t aware of the following:

1) You can drag-and-drop pages within PDFs in Preview.app, to re-arrange the page order. You can also delete pages using the Edit menu (and add blank ones, if that floats your boat). More detail here.

I’ve also just discovered that you can use Cmd-R to rotate either a single page or all pages between portrait and landscape orientation.

2) If you’re a fan of the command-line, there’s a built-in script to join multiple PDFs. I originally found it on this blog (turns out they’re investigating protein misfolding and aggregation, small world). Basically, you can find the script at the following location (all one line, obviously):

/System/Library/Automator/Combine PDF pages.action/Contents/Resources/join.py

If you want to add the path to your .profile file, don’t forget to put it in quotes otherwise OS X will baulk at the spaces. To use the script, just go like so…

~ $ join.py -o output.pdf input1.pdf input2.pdf ... inputN.pdf

I’m not suggesting these are particularly life-changing pieces of news, but I wasn’t aware of them so thought I’d spread the love.