My “simple” objective is to use a keyboard shortcut to change the color of a block of highlighted text in a TextEdit document to (for example) “blue”.
I have tried to create a simple Applescript to set the font of highlighted text (“the selection”) to “blue” but I kept getting type reference errors until I opened a new document, pasted the highlighted text into it, changed the color, then copied the text back into the original document. And now, if I try to automate this script with a keyboard shortcut it fails,
though when the Script Editor is open and I click on “Run” it works. How come? Any way [1] make it work with a keyboard shortcut and [2] avoid creating a new/temp document?
{see code snippet A}
I have also tried automating the color picker: can use System Events to control the keystrokes to bring up the color picker but then I am lost: I don’y know how to get System Events or keystrokes or even standard commands to set a specified color.
{see code snippet B}
Any help or hints would be vastly appreciated.
– code snippet A –
-- Code: Change Highlighted Text to Blue
-- Andrew White 3 Jan 2007
-- uses a 2nd document to make the change & copy back
--
set theText to "" as string
property paraColor : {0, 65000, 0}
-- copy the selected text to clipboard
tell application "TextEdit"
activate
tell application "System Events"
tell process "TextEdit"
keystroke "c" using {command down}
end tell
end tell
--set theText to the clipboard as text
set theText to (the clipboard)
-- paste to new document
set newDoc to (make new document at beginning of documents)
set the text of document 1 to (the clipboard)
-- color the text of the entire new document
tell the text of document 1
-- set the color of every word to {0, 65535, 0} -- green
--set the color of every word to {65535, 0, 0} -- red
set the color of every word to {0, 0, 65535} -- blue
end tell
-- copy the colored text to clipboard
--set the clipboard to the text of document 1
--set text of document 1 to (the clipboard)
tell application "System Events"
tell process "TextEdit"
keystroke "a" using {command down}
--delay 1
keystroke "c" using {command down}
end tell
end tell
-- close the temp document
close document 1 saving no
-- temp: paste to new document
-- set newDoc to (make new document at beginning of documents)
-- paste to original document (hopefully still highlighted selection)
tell application "System Events"
tell process "TextEdit"
keystroke "v" using {command down}
end tell
end tell
end tell
– code snippet B –
tell application "TextEdit" to activate
tell application "System Events"
tell process "TextEdit"
-- this just pops up the color picker
keystroke "c" using {command down, shift down}
-- but how to make a given color "selected" ?
-- and if selected will it change the highlighted text color?
end tell
end tell
As with so many things, the trick is to break it down into more easily digestible chunks ” exactly as you’ve been doing.