The built-in PDF support in OS X is simply great. I just found two additional helpers:

• creating PDFs from office documents via OpenOffice, on the command line - Batch Converting Legacy Documents at XML.com (copy & paste their Basic macro, write ""/Applications/OpenOffice.org 2.1.app//Contents/MacOS/program/soffice" -invisible 'macro:///Standard.Module1.SaveAsPDF("/Users/tim/Desktop/test.ppt")'" into a shell script and run it with "open-x11 test.sh")
• combining PDFs from the command line - Combine PDFs without using Automator at macosxhints.com ("python '/System/Library/Automator/Combine PDF Pages.action/Contents/Resources/join.py' -o '/Users/tim/Desktop/output.pdf' '/Users/tim/Desktop/hello world.pdf' '/Users/tim/Desktop/hello world 2.pdf'")