It probably is not a good idea to call the script epstopdf as there is a commandline perl script for doing this with the same name. I think it is installed from ghostscript, a defualt install with OS X. Just trying to alert folks to possible confusion.

Someone else can tell us if the epstopdf perl script will handle multiple file reduction to a single pdf file. I am not sure about this. Seems like a good excuse for avoiding using Adobe's overpriced distiller.

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If not you can use the following to take the pdfs and join them:


gs -q -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOutputFile=merged.pdf

Net price: $0

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Or just a one-liner with ImageMagic:

convert ~/Desktop/convert/*.ps ~/Desktop/convert/pdf.pdf

This works with a multipage file or multiple files.

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...is what it's actually called. Find out more here.

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Distilling multiple files is built into distiller though. We're still using an old distiller (4) on OS 9, but I bet the functionality is still there. It is not as simple as a GUI "Distill all these", but in the "Xtras" foilder there are two files RunFilEx.ps and RunDirEx.ps that are sufficiently commented to demo how to concatenate arbitrary files, or whole folders of eps/ps files

I'm not sure about the above applescript, but I know for sure with this method that font subsets are amalgamated with this method, where simple concatenation of PDFs ends up duplicating font data producing larger files than needed

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