Automate PDF File Size

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Moderator: Mr_Noodle

Automate PDF File Size Tue May 24, 2016 10:01 am • by theFile
Hi Folks,

I have a ton, and am constantly downloading a ton, of PDFs of articles from academic journals. Some repositories of journal articles have an annoying feature of adding a cover page to the journal article, where the page size of the cover page is different from the rest of the PDF pages. (So, page 1 of the PDF is bigger than all other pages, which are the same size.) I can manually fix this by exporting to PDF in preview, and changing the paper size to "Letter." I can't, however, figure out how to automate this process. (One option would be to try to automate the deletion of the first page, but I'd prefer not to do that.)

I realize that Hazel itself would not do any of this, but my hope was that somebody has experience with using Hazel to watch a folder, and is familiar with scripts, or Automator actions, or command-line trickery so as to make something like this happen. I've searched the AppleScript dictionaries for PDFPenPro, Preview, Skim, and Acrobat to no avail. Any help, ideas, or suggestions would be fantastic!

(Sorry in advance if this is the wrong board for this topic!)

Cheers,
Caleb
theFile
 
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Re: Automate PDF File Size Tue May 24, 2016 10:43 am • by Mr_Noodle
I believe there is the option to record your actions. You can give that a try and see if that works reliably for you.
Mr_Noodle
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