Re: AppleScript and shell scripting
Re: AppleScript and shell scripting
- Subject: Re: AppleScript and shell scripting
- From: David Wolfe <email@hidden>
- Date: Tue, 31 Jul 2007 23:48:13 -0400
On Jul 31, 2007, at 9:45 PM, T&B wrote:
AppleScript provides a language/environment to tell other programs
what to do. You can use it to script AppleWorks or iWork to draw
object of a particular color, create charts etc. You can use it to
create a spreadsheet to perform complex trig calculations, by
telling spreadsheet software what to do. By design, it has a very
small syntax library within itself, and only basic maths and string
functionality. It is designed to glue or automate the functionality
of other programs, not re-invent that functionality within itself.
Thank you, Tom, for this paragraph. It's exactly what I've been
thinking the entire time I have been reading this thread. It's
exactly this "glue" that Applescript provides that interests most of
us who use this list.
Using Applescript I (a non-programmer with zero programming
experience) can tell InDesign to print a batch of layouts to
postscript files, one page per file, named following a convention
that I've established. I can tell the Finder to move those files to
an Acrobat Distiller watched folder where Distiller will convert them
to PDFs. Then I can tell the Finder to move the new PDFs to another
folder that's managed by Enfocus Pitstop Server, which will preflight
the files and perform a series of transforms on them resulting in
five different versions of those PDFs, each serving a particular need
of my clients, then print the files out and zip them up to be placed
on a DVD.
With the help of this list, I figured out how to create this
Applescript solution in about three days. For every 1000+ page
textbook we produce, it allows us to do in 2-3 days, what previously
took 2 weeks to accomplish manually.
It's at this kind of thing that Applescript, even with all its
peculiarities and limitations, truly shines.
David
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