Appscript, Word and PDF
Appscript, Word and PDF
- Subject: Appscript, Word and PDF
- From: richard brosnahan <email@hidden>
- Date: Mon, 28 Aug 2006 13:47:14 -0400
The announcement of the new version of appscript reminded me of some
work I did recently to script the conversion of microsoft word docs
to PDFs. I used appscript to accomplish this task because I'm a big
fan of Python, plus python fits better into what I ultimately need to
do.
In any case, my solution works very well, tho it took me awhile to
get there.
To convert Word docs to PDF, thru scripting, I first installed cups-
pdf. This nice utility is open source, and it creates a virtual
printer. this gets around the problem of doing UI scripting in the
print dialog. UI scripting for me, has been problematic. Once
installed, you can just tell word to print to that printer, and there
are no dialog dismissals nessa.
http://www.codepoetry.net/projects/cups-pdf-for-mosx
Next, I downloaded appscript, installed it, and read the
documentation. The syntax for appscript is rather odd, compared to
applescript, but makes sense. I had to read the docs thoroughly
before I understood.
http://appscript.sourceforge.net/index.html
Then I scripted.
#! /usr/local/bin/python
from appscript import *
def print2pdf(theDocPath):
word = app("Microsoft Word")
word.launch()
word.active_printer = u'PDF_Virtual_Printer'
theDoc = word.open(theDocPath)
word.print_out(theDocPath)
word.documents[1].close(saving = k.no)
print2pdf("Big Disk:Documents:aWordDocument.doc")
theDocPath is a string describing the path to the document you want
to print. It is : delimited, not / delimited. the active_printer
should be set to what you called your virtual printer.
One could translate this to pure AppleScript if they needed.
Thought this might be useful.
BTW, I really like appscript. Many thanks to those who have worked on
this terrific utility.
--
Richard Brosnahan
Owner
Engineering Art, L.L.C
email@hidden
M 804.304.6880
Talent hits a target no one else can hit; Genius hits a target no one
else can see.
Arthur Schopenhauer
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