On 3/22/07 John Delacour wrote:
>If all that's needed is to copy the whole text of a pdf window and
>put it in a text file, then GUI scripting can be used.
Just make sure Preview has Text Tool chosen, or add that to the script,
keystroke "2" using command down
Also, with larger documents, the delay might have to be longer.
In a completely programmed usage, you might also want to make sure that
the clipboard is empty before running this script. When I copied the
script from John's message into Script Editor and ran it on a large PDF
(5.7 MB) doc, Preview hadn't finished selecting the whole text when the
script copied, so what was pasted into trash.txt was the script, because
that was in my clipboard just before I ran the script. The longer delay
took care of that, but careful data handling can save lots of grief
later...
John's script, slightly modified:
tell application "System Events"
set the clipboard to "" -- no spurious clipboard content
tell process "Preview"
set frontmost to true
keystroke "2" using command down -- use text Tool
keystroke "a" using command down
delay 1 -- or longer for large docs
keystroke "c" using command down
end tell
end tell
set _text to the clipboard
do shell script "cd; pbpaste > trash.txt; open -a bbedit trash.txt"
HTH,
- Bruce
__bruce__van_allen__santa_cruz__ca__
