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Re: Help/suggestions for two projects involving Automator, possibly AppleScript

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Re: Help/suggestions for two projects involving Automator, possibly AppleScript

Subject: Re: Help/suggestions for two projects involving Automator, possibly AppleScript
From: Paul Waldo <email@hidden>
Date: Mon, 27 Oct 2014 12:30:50 -0400

Hi Ken,

I think I can help out with the first part. Automator sometimes hurts my head the way it wants things to be set up. I'm an old Unix guy, so I use a command line solution if an Automator task is too complicated (for me). I tried to find the book you were referring to, but I'm not sure I got it right. Feel free to change the URL in the command below, as well as the page range. In Terminal.app, run this:

curl "http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/imgsrv/download/pdf?id=njp.32101078194352;orient=0;size=100;seq=[1-10];attachment=0" -o "my_book_name_page_#1.pdf"

It will save the pages as individual PDFs named my_book_name_page_#.pdf, where # is the page number. It produces output like this:

[1/10]: http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/imgsrv/download/pdf?id=njp.32101078194352;orient=0;size=100;seq=1;attachment=0 --> my_book_name_page_1.pdf

% Total % Received % Xferd Average Speed Time Time Time Current

Dload Upload Total Spent Left Speed

100 607k 0 607k 0 0 222k 0 --:--:-- 0:00:02 --:--:-- 222k

[2/10]: http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/imgsrv/download/pdf?id=njp.32101078194352;orient=0;size=100;seq=2;attachment=0 --> my_book_name_page_2.pdf

100 198k 0 198k 0 0 88111 0 --:--:-- 0:00:02 --:--:-- 152k

[3/10]: http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/imgsrv/download/pdf?id=njp.32101078194352;orient=0;size=100;seq=3;attachment=0 --> my_book_name_page_3.pdf

100 151k 0 151k 0 0 67084 0 --:--:-- 0:00:02 --:--:-- 115k

I hope that helps!

Paul

On Sun, Oct 26, 2014 at 11:28 PM, Ken Springer <email@hidden> wrote:

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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Paul Waldo
http://paulwaldo.com

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	>Help/suggestions for two projects involving Automator, possibly AppleScript (From: Ken Springer <email@hidden>)

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