Syncing Your PDFpen Library with Multiple Macs

Here’s a great tip we got from Steven H.:

dropbox“If you use PDFpen/PDFpenPro on multiple Macs, you can sync the Library using Dropbox. The trick is in how you get PDFpen to find the Library when it’s in your Dropbox and not where it normally expects it. You do that with a symlink. Both PDFpen and PDFpenPro use the same Library location (good thinking on that Smile), ~/Library/Application Support/PDFpen.

“The only real trick here is symlink creation. For that I like to use an OSX service called SymbolicLinker. When installed, SymbolicLinker adds a “Make Symbolic Link” item to the Services context menu in Finder. Download SymbolicLinker here and move the SymbolicLinker.service file to /Library/Services (that’s /Library at the root, not in your User folder, although it should work fine there too if you don’t have multiple users on the Mac). If you do not have a Services folder in Library, just create one and put the file there. Logout and back in or reboot to activate the service. Now you’re ready to do this…

1. Shut down PDFpen is you have it open.

2. Move your ~/Library/Application Support/PDFpen folder into your Dropbox.

3. Right-click over the folder that you just moved and select Make Symbolic Link from the Services context menu. You will now have a file called “PDFpen symlink” right next to the PDFpen folder in your Dropbox.

4. Move the newly created symlink back to ~/Library/Application Support (where you just moved the original folder from) and rename it to delete the symlink portion of the file name so it is just plain “PDFpen”.

“That’s it. This also moves scripts and anything else that may be stored in that same location. (PDFpenPro scripts are in ~/Library/Application Support/PDFpenPro, so if you want those synced, you’ll need to do another symlink, but now you see how easy that is.

“Symbolic links are great combined with Dropbox when an app does not let you select where to store data. I also use them for Delicious Library and GarageSale, both of which have monster amounts of data associated with them compared to the PDFpen Library.”

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Our thanks to Steven for the great tip! Feel free to send yours to jean@smilesoftware.com.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 24th, 2011 at 3:49 pm and is filed under PDFpen, PDFpen Tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

One Response to “Syncing Your PDFpen Library with Multiple Macs”

  1. Jerry DaBell says:
    September 5, 2012 at 6:36 am

    It’s a little cumbersome but works as advertised. The process has to be repeated on each computer that you want to sync.

    Thanks to Steven.
    JLD

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