iWork/Pages problems
iWork/Pages problems
- Subject: iWork/Pages problems
- From: Brennan <email@hidden>
- Date: Mon, 20 Aug 2007 15:21:18 +0200
Hi folks,
I'm trying to put together a script to convert my many Appleworks
documents to iWork documents.
Starting off with WP documents which should of course become Pages
documents. If and when Numbers becomes scriptable I'll be able to have a
fork which handles Appleworks spreadsheets too, but that's for the future.
I've got a sunny day scenario working, and even some rainy days, but
sometimes it doesn't rain but it pours.
I've discovered that Pages chokes on Appleworks WP documents which are not
'new' enough. I guess that means they were created with ClarisWorks 5 or
older. Fair enough.
The 'manual' solution is to open these documents in Appleworks 6, make a
small change, save them, and *then* open them in Pages. (You can see why I
need a script).
Problem is, I can't see any way for my script to be able to tell whether a
.cwk document is new enough for pages to open it. Suggestions?
Another problem is that Pages throws an ugly error alert box even if
'open' is in a try... block; Example
set theFile to (choose file)
tell application "Pages"
try
set f to open theFile
on error msg number n
display dialog msg default answer (n as string)
end try
end tell
Point that snippet at an old clarisworks file, and even though it's in a
'try' block, Pages still throws up an import error alert. Any ideas for
getting around this? Do I have to use GUI scripting?
Oh, and to add insult to injury, I discovered that when scripting Pages,
'open' does not return a reference to the opened file.
GRRRRR!!!
Workaround is something like
set theFile to (choose file)
tell application "Pages"
-- hack to find out if 'open' succeeded
-- because Pages' 'open' does not return a reference
try
set d to document 1
on error msg number n
set d to missing value
end try
try
set f to open theFile
on error msg number n
display dialog msg default answer (n as string)
end try
if (d is document 1) then
-- open failed
return false
end if
end tell
How many times do we have to see this bug? It was in QuickTime Player too,
and since they fixed it, I naively assumed it wouldn't appear again in
Apple's own Cocoa-based software, but there it is.
--
Brennan Young
A pure description would include all the facts (i.e., all the effective differences) immanent in the phenomena to be described but would indicate no kind of connection among these phenomena that might make them more understandable.
- Gregory Bateson
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