Rearranging PDF pages to be ordered by size

Questions & Suggestions
1

I have been trying to figure out a solution to this problem for months so any help/guidance/ideas would be incredibly appreciated. I feel like there's gotta be a solution to this between applescript, automator, keyboard maestro or something else but I'm stumped.

I often need to print PDFs that have multiple page sizes (legal and letter) and the different page sizes are mixed throughout the total document. When I'm at my office I have the ability to print exactly in the order needed and have mixed paper sizes by using Adobe Acrobat. However when I am not at my office I don't have this ability as I carry a single tray printer with me in my car. I often have little notice/time to get back to the office to print the PDF document so I need a way to do this with my single tray printer. I'd also love to be able to do this locally on a mac I carry with. I don't want to use a web service to sort the pages due to confidentiality reasons.

So that's my long lead up to my question...does anyone know a way to sort PDF pages by paper/page size? I'd like the pages still kept in order within their "stacks" of letter and legal size pages. Even better would be to have some kind of index page print at the end showing what pages were moved/where they go when manually reassembled but that's a lofty ambition and not a necessity.

Thanks for any help and guidance!

2

Is your intention to have all of the letter size pages print first, then a notification to add legal size paper and resume printing all of those pages?

3

That could work. I was thinking more of generating two new PDFs, one named letter.pdf and one named legal.pdf. Another option that I'd be happy with is getting a list of the letter size page numbers that I could put into the Print dialog in the page selection box...and then do the same thing for the legal size pages.

4

Here's an idea: I don't know -- i'm just guessing based on my knowledge of AppleScript and Acrobat.

Perhaps AppleScript could loop through all pages of a PDF, getting the page size from the page properties, and saving the results into two variables, one for letter, one for legal.

I'd start with a google search on "AppleScript acrobat page properties", and also "JavaScript acrobat page properties", since Acrobat directly supports JavaScript.

Here's another idea that may or may not be acceptable: Print using a zoom to fit page, where letter size is selected.

Good luck, and let us know how it goes.

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