Intro, and a problem with a workflow.
Intro, and a problem with a workflow.
- Subject: Intro, and a problem with a workflow.
- From: "Ron J." <email@hidden>
- Date: Sat, 22 Mar 2008 01:45:29 -0500
Hi everyone!
First, let me introduce myself.
I'm Ron Johnson, a totally blind Mac user, hailing from the
Southeastern part of the great state of South Dakota. I've been using
Macs, now, for just about exactly 9 years. I got my first Mac, a
Blueberry 333 MHz iMac G3, on April 25th, 1999.
I'm currently running an iMac G5, purchased on April 29th, 2005, the
date Tiger was released, and VoiceOver was ready for Prime Time! Just
prior to that, I was a participant in the "Spoken Interface Preview"
project, the initial development phase of VoiceOver. Currently, I'm
running Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard.
Recently, I decided to explore Automator, as it's finally accessible
to VO. About 2 days ago, I read a posting to the MacVoiceover list,
from an individual wanting to convert PDF files to text, then to
speech, presumably for playback in iTunes, on an iPod, etc.
Naturally I thought, "Ahha! Here's a chance for me to do something
good for someone!", and I proceeded to write an Automator workflow, to
do precisely what this person wants to do. I think I'm on the right
track, however, I've encountered a vexing problem.
The workflow seems to execute just fine - no warnings. Problem is,
my final output, before processing it with Text-to-Speech, is a text
file with three copies of the selected PDF file's extracted text in
it! As you can well-imagine, if lengthly PDFs are selected for
processing, this renders even longer output for TTS processing. Here
are the steps in my workflow:
1. Get Confirmation action. Here, I explain to the user what the
workflow will do.
2. Ask for Text. Here, I give the user the chance to determine how
many words per minute the text should be spoken at. The user is
presented with a default answer "[[ rate ### ]]". The user is
required to supply the answer, and is instructed to replace the "###"
with a value, which is the WPM.
3. New Text File. This file holds the "rate command", requested in
the previous action. It is saved on the Desktop, as a file named
"Rate.txt", and "Replace Existing Files" is checked.
4. Ask For finder Items. Here, I have an appropriate prompt, the
starting point is "Desktop", the Type is "Files", and "Allow Multiple
Selection" is unchecked.
5. Extract PDF Text. For this, the output is set to "Plain Text", is
saved to "Desktop", has a "Custom Filename" of "Source.txt", and
"Replace Existing Files" is checked. Also, I have "Page Header", and
"Page Footer", unchecked.
6. Get Specified Finder Items. Here, I added the two text files,
which now reside on the Desktop. The files are in the list,
"Rate.txt", being first, followed by "Source.txt".
7. Combine Text Files. Here, the two files listed in the previous
action, are joined together. The resulting file has the "Rate"
command on the first line, followed by the extracted PDF Text.
8. New TextEdit Document. The output of the previous action, now
shows up here. This is where things get funky! I examine my file in
TextEdit, and see that my "Rate" command is, indeed, at the top of the
file, as it should be. Next, I see the text extracted from the
selected PDF. As I keep going down, I see this text repeated again,
and going further, I see it repeated, yet again!
9. Get Specified Finder Items. Same list, as before, so the files
can be deleted, so as not to clutter up the user's Desktop.
10. Move Finder Items To Trash. This deletes "Rate.txt" and
"Source.txt".
Following this, I would put an "Get Items From TextEdit" action, so
the "Text to Audio File" action has something to chew on. In this
last action, I would have it show at run-time, so the user could
select a location to save it, and give the file a name.
Carrying this to its logical conclusion, I'd have iTunes convert it
to a compressed format, such as .MP3, , add it to a playlist, and
delete the original .AIFf file.
I haven't, as yet, implemented these last steps, as I feel, until the
current problem is resolved, it makes no sense to go further.
Am I on the right track? What's going on here? Is this some type of
bug, a flaw in my logic, what? Any help would be *greatly* appreciated!
Regards,
Ron
Ron J. | AKA Ganahee
"For millions of years, mankind lived, just like the animals. Then
something happened, which unleashed the power of our imagination - we
learned to talk."
From the MD "The Division Bell", the track "Keep Talking".
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