For my BSL level 3 course I have a variety of OpenOffice documents for different forms etc which make up the portfolio. I wanted a way to merge these into a single document but they each had different margins and all sorts; this meant doing it within OpenOffice was proving to be a pain. My solution was to write a quick shell script to convert each document into PDF and then merge the multiple PDFs. The script looks something like the following:
# convert to pdf
unoconv -f pdf myfile1.odt myfile2.odt ...
# merge pdfs
pdftk myfile1.pdf myfile2.pdf ...
# remove individual pdf documents
rm myfile1.pdf myfile2.pdf ...
A handy little hack to generate my entire portfolio.