Hello everyone
OK here’s the dilema
I have several years worth of documents, ( not supported anymore, i.e. Paperport & global village mostly) they are sorted within nested folders. I need to convert them all to PDF. This is possible manually by using the old application and Acrobat 5.0. What I need is direction and help if it is possible to utilize Applescript to go through these folders and files open them up / print them to PDF / save them back to the original folder they were in. / & trash the old files. Now here is the kickker, It seems niether global villlage nor Paperport 5.0 is applescriptable. And to make things even more interesting, I have not found any current application (OS 9 / OS X ) that can open either of these files types. I have tried all image app’s and maclink plus 14, etc.etc. Is it somehow possible to get the finder to simply open them in the correct app, trigger printing, and so on. Please any help WILL be Greatly appriciated. As there are over 28000 files to process and by hand it would be quite time consuming.
Thank you
Synergyx
Well, this can be done, one way or another. First of all, you should know that, in the Mac OS, even applications that aren’t scriptable must respond to the print event if they want to be able to print documents. So, all you need is PDFWriter from Adobe or PrintToPDF from whats-his-name.
That’s the good news. Here’s where it gets annoying. I can’t find any way to suppress the print dialogs in either of those print drivers. Is’t possible? Anyone? Please tell me it’s possible.
If it’s not possible, you’ll have to get Okey Dokey Pro or some other small script utility to press the “OK” button when the print dialog pops up.
Other than that, it should be pretty straighforward. However, more info is needed: How can a script locate the files? How are they arranged in Finder? I hope it’s something easy like ‘every single file in folders descended from a single root folder needs to be converted’. Another promising candidate is ‘all the files are in folders descended from this single root folder, plus I know the file type for each variety of document that needs to be converted’. Unfortunate answers would be like ‘the files are scattered across three hard drives’ and ‘most of the files in this root folder need to be printed–I’ll know them when I see them’.