You will need a little external help for Applescript to coordinate this. Use something like Image Events or Imagine Photo (http://www.yvs.eu.com/imaginephoto.html) to resize the images, if necessary.
For the PDF part, my suggestion will involve a bit of a learning curve because it involves learning some Ruby, but hey, you're the one who wants "free". Download Prawn, a RubyGem for creating PDF files -- it will do exactly what you need. (http://prawn.majesticseacreature.com/) You can even use Prawn to scale the graphics, I think. So your basic workflow would be to use Applescript to get the list of filenames, which you would then pass to a Ruby script which would do the actual PDF creation. You can try to run the Ruby script from a "do shell" in Applescript, but the quoting and escaping that ensues is a world of hurt. You are much better off storing a version of the Rubyscript in a text file with placeholder text for the file lists which Applescript will substitute in. Those Applescript lists need to be converted to a form Ruby understands (not difficult). Then you can just read in the Ruby script into Applescript from the text file, "search and replace" your placeholder text with the applescript variables you want in there and then save the text file somewhere (as a .rb file) and make it executable. Run it from Applescript using: do shell script "MacHD/Users/MyUser/myRubyScript.rb" Move the Ruby executable to the trash when done.
Here is a simple example I created quite a while back to make small PDFs which would fit onto the iphone http://forums.supercard.us/viewtopic.php?f=17&t=53&p=290&hilit=vince#p290 And here is the entire script which was created to take text from Supercard and insert it into a text only PDF sized for the iPhone:
#!/usr/bin/env ruby
require 'rubygems'
require "prawn"
x = <<BIG_STRING_DELIM
xxxINSERTED_TEXTxxx
BIG_STRING_DELIM
# margins in the next line seem to be pixels...
pdf = Prawn::Document.new(:page_size => "A6", :page_layout => :portrait, :left_margin => 20, :right_margin => 20, :top_margin => 20, :bottom_margin => 35)
pdf.font "Helvetica"
pdf.text "TITLE_OF_DOCUMENT_HERE \n", :size => 18
pdf.text "AUTHOR_HERE \n (c)2008", :size => 10
pdf.start_new_page
pdf.font "Helvetica"
pdf.text x, :size => 10
pdf.render_file "myPDF.pdf" So you would, for example read in the script into an Applescript variable, then replace 'xxxINSERTED_TEXTxxx' with the main body text, and replace "TITLE_OF_DOCUMENT_HERE" and "AUTHOR_HERE" then save the script as an executable ruby (.rb) file and execute it from the command line as described above. Vióla. Good luck! vince
hi Shane,
You're right, and I didn't explain it clearly. And it isn't easy :)
I just want to avoid any commercial application to get it done.
Any default app like preview would be OK to use or even pdfroff
NAME
pdfroff - create PDF documents using groff
Many thanks for your comments,
jan
On 6 mei 2012, at 11:44, Shane Stanley wrote:
> On 06/05/2012, at 6:56 PM, Jan-Bultereys wrote:
>
>> no feedback on this topic
>
> I'm still trying to come to grips with your comment that it "looks easy". I mean, you can describe any task in simple terms, and say it looks easy. (Take a few kg or plutonium... it looks easy...)
>
> But applications are written for a reason. And given that AppleScript, of all languages, was written basically as a way of driving applications rather than doing stuff itself, I'm a bit surprised at your expectations.
>
> --
> Shane Stanley <email@hidden>
> 'AppleScriptObjC Explored' <www.macosxautomation.com/applescript/apps/>
>
>
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