Through a simple combination of Automator (a little known feature of OS X), Dropbox and GoodReader, I now have more than 450 City of London PDFs available on my iPad. The documents cover a wide range of topics (budgeting, business planning, bylaws, research and statistics, planning and development, etc) and are organized into subfolders.
Here's how it works:
- I created a workflow in Automator to retrieve the contents of the current webpage in Safari, get the URLs linked to from that page, filter the URLs to only include PDFs, and then download those PDFs to my dropbox folder.
- For each topic, I visited the City of London's helpful web pages and run the workflow, which downloads all of the PDFs in a matter of a few minutes.
- I've shared the dropbox folder with a half a dozen Londoners who also would like access to these PDFs
- I connected GoodReader on my iPad to download and keep the the City of London dropbox synchronized with my iPad.