Help/suggestions for two projects involving Automator, possibly AppleScript
Help/suggestions for two projects involving Automator, possibly AppleScript
- Subject: Help/suggestions for two projects involving Automator, possibly AppleScript
- From: Ken Springer <email@hidden>
- Date: Sun, 26 Oct 2014 21:28:04 -0600
First, a bit of background that explains the why I'm trying to automate
a couple things.
Often referred to as "The World's Greatest Gold Camp", I've really
become interested in the history for this area, Cripple Creek, Colorado,
USA. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cripple_Creek,_Colorado
To my dismay, I've learned the newer the book on the area, the more
likely it is to contain errors. Even the local oral history is so often
wrong, or people embellish it. I've also learned the information I'm
seeking is often not in a book category or subject where I think the
information would be found.
I don't want to know the errors, I want to know the truth, as best as
one can discover it at this time.
So, I'm searching for books on the area that are as old as I can find.
I already have some from the 1890's that have been digitized, and I've
downloaded them from various sites.
To accomplish this accumulation of information, I'm using the best tools
I can find that fit me and the project, and that includes both OS X and
Windows 8. (Win 8 simply because it seems to be the most secure and
quickest of the last few releases from Microsoft. I don't like the
desktop interface at all, so using a few free utilities, I'm customizing
the user interface for my own comfort level.)
Project #1:
The Hathi Trust seems to be one of the best places to find these old
books in digitized format. http://www.hathitrust.org/ The books can be
downloaded as PDF scans (image files not text files) both as the full
book or as single pages. Unfortunately, to download the entire book you
have to be a member of a "participating institution", which appears to
be a college or university which I am not connected with. :-( So I'm
left with downloading and saving one page at a time.
One book I'm interested in is 698 pages long!! Download this manually
one page at a time? I don't think so. LOL The obvious solution seems
to be automating the "one page at a time" process to get the entire book
to my hard drive.
Having survived a programming course in Basic many years ago, I've
pretty much mapped out the basic steps in my mind to accomplish this,
and think most of it can be done with the simple "Watch Me Do" feature
of Automator. Where the simple "Watch Me Do" feature fails is the need
to loop the process until all pages are downloaded and saved, plus
variable time for the individual pages to download, and then stop once
the last page is downloaded and saved.
At this point, I can manually load all the pages into Preview and then
create a single complete PDF file. Ultimately, I would add even this
step to the workflow program. One thing under consideration, is while I
can search any of these books when reading the book online, after it's
downloaded, each page is an image and therefore cannot be searched. So
I may end up running each file through an OCR program at some point.
Project #2:
I want to add metadata to image files. Once added, I can use the
Libraries feature of Windows 8 (and 7 if I was using 7) to categorize
photographs I've been downloading using the metadata. (Sadly, I've found
no way to duplicate what I want to accomplish here using OS X. :-( )
I'm in the midst of investigating this project right now. That's
because programmers seem bent on not using the same category name for
the same metadata.
At http://macosxautomation.com/ there is a service you can download that
lets you add metadata into 4 different fields in the EXIF data. But,
I'm not sure it's correct at the moment. Pathfinder 6 file management
program shows EXIF metadata, but data entered into one of the fields
using the service does not show up in Pathfinder unless I've missed it
up to this point. I need to find out why this is, and then I have to
find out what the fields are called when I'm in Windows 8. (Hair
pulling time! LOL)
As part of this, I need to find out if I can modify the service from
macosxautomation. The image services from macosxautomation do not show
up in Pathfinder 6 when an image file is selected, but they do if
selected in the Finder. I suspect the service needs to be changed to be
available in all apps, not just the Finder and who knows what else. If
it can't be changed, then I'll have to create my own or purchase a 3rd
party program.
How many people are asleep after reading this?? LOL
Ken
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