Apple

Howdy,

Haven't been on the list for a long time. (Sorry John Pugh for sending just to you.) I'm trying to put together a workflow that's kind of an attempt to take care of a repetitive Kludge we need to do, but it works for us. We're using Flashform to create e-learning pages to run in Blackboard. Our designer is creating the pages in Quark. (Don't ask why, this is what I'm stuck with.) The process goes from Quark to a PDF export. The PDF is opened in Illustrator and exported as Illustrator CS eps files. (Again, don't ask, I have no power to change these people's minds about software, and with the current economic environment, we're stuck with what we have.)

We open the Illustrator file in Flash and copy/paste the pages into Flashform, then add media. Flashform itself is impossibly incapable of designing pages with the level of sophistication we need in terms of embedding rich media and typographic controls. It may be a roundabout way to get this done, but we've been told by experts in e-learning we're producing the best e-learning courses they've seen.

Anyway, here's my question:

Can someone tell me how to open a multi-page PDF file (generated by Quark) in Illustrator CS4? I need to go to each page of the document and then save each page as an individual legacy Illustrator CS eps file.

I'm just getting started with the automating process, and I know how to tell Illustrator how to begin to open the file, but I can't get past the dialog box which asks me which page I want to open. I want to open them sequentially and export each page one after the other.

I want it to be able to go through a whole folder of PDFs and export the pages for each document. I can do all the file naming and handling, but the actual opening in Illustrator and going to the right page and exporting has me stumped. The Adobe documentation for Applescript for Illustrator doesn't have anything about opening Acrobat files.

--Start script

set processFolder to (choose folder with prompt "Choose the folder with the PDFs:" without invisibles)

tell application "Finder"

set these_items to (get every document file of processFolder whose kind contains {"Adobe PDF document"})

end tell

repeat with i from 1 to count of these_items

set this_item to (the name of item 5 of these_items as text)

set nameOfFile to (processFolder & this_item as text) as alias

tell application "Adobe Illustrator"

-- here's where I get into trouble I can't figure out how to get past the dialog

open nameOfFile with options {update legacy text:true}

end tell

end repeat

--end script

I get to the line "open nameOfFile with options {update legacy text:true}" and Illustrator has the file open and the dialog box asking me to pick a page. How do I suppress that dialog box and go to the first page I want so I can export it?

Thanks.