I’m working on a draft of a legal document. I have several exhibits, in pdf form, that relate to the text in the document. Several of the exhibits have more than one page.
Currently, I have all my exhibits in the reference folder, that I have renamed as exhibits. I have set Scrivener links to the referenced exhibit in the draft and I can pull them up. I rename the pdf files for reference purposes (something like Exhibit 12 - email 1-12-12 jl) which makes them very easy to find and check.
But - this is an extensive bit of documentation. I was hoping that there would be a way to include the pdf files in compile, but if there is, I can’t find it. I have tried making an exhibits folder and dropping pdf files on draft pages. With multi-page pdfs, that produces a scrolling window of the document, but when I compile, I only get the first page.
At this point, the only I idea I have for this is developing a compiled pdf using Preview on OSX and sending it along with the completed document. But - I would really like a way to just include the reference folder in compile for this because then Scrivener links would take readers to the reference documents.
So - if anyone knows of a way to produce a single document that would include both the draft text and the reference files, I would be very happy to know.
How important is it that the content of the PDF files be in the compiled document? It would seem to me that the best to handle this, how I have always handled attached media, is to refer to the documents are resource material (in footnotes or whatever) and then include the full report as a series of documents. Then you could just select the PDFs that need to be included as attachments, and use File/Export/Files... to get them out of the Binder after you compile. If they are scattered around, keeping these production attachments in a Collection might be the easiest way to handle that.
As you note, dropping PDFs into a text editor isn’t really the solution. That feature is meant to allow one to include PDF vector or raster illustrations in a text, it is not meant to include large documents inside of documents.
If you really do need the everything in one single file, some sort of post-production tool that can glue together multiple PDFs is what you want. Even Preview can do an Okay job of this, but if you do a lot of it, investing in Acrobat might be a good idea.
Just so you know this has come up once or twice before, and it’s not something Keith has expressed any interest in doing. The problem is, there are narrow cases where gluing together PDF files does make sense, but in most cases it makes no sense at all since PDF files already have their own formatting, will be paginated according to themselves and not the document as a whole, and are already embedded into a print solution with page and margin settings applied. Thus trying to shoe-horn them into another container document that has its own margins, page numbering and so on would only make for an undesirable result.