Workflows

Comments

14 Comments »

  1. Rhet, many thanks for this, I’ve been trying to get a workflow to work with little success, and yours just does! I use it for archiving scanned documents. I scan a bunch of pages in order as Jpegs and run your script. I altered the “sort by” to creation date in descending order as this ensures the pages are in the order I scanned them in.

    Comment by Justin Chapman — July 17, 2007 @ 4:41 pm

  2. Thank you thank you thank you… I’ve been looking for a way to bookify some image collections I have and this is definitely the most elegant way to do it.

    Comment by Byron Doyle — July 29, 2007 @ 5:17 am

  3. This is really beautiful. Thank you for taking the time to do this. One little suggestion is that there is a security issue with dumping these files to /private/tmp — especially since they don’t get cleaned up by the script. It would be better to put the temporary files in /private/tmp/UID or perhaps a hidden folder in the home directory (which can then be tossed).

    Comment by Kristofer — October 2, 2007 @ 12:31 am

  4. Ignore my previous post. It turns out the default Preview app automator action also dumps the resulting tmp file into /private/tmp. So all my attempts at securing this are come to naught. Maybe I’ll look at the python script that underlies it.

    Comment by Kristofer — October 2, 2007 @ 1:27 am

  5. awesome, I tried doing that. Thanks a lot for posting the workflow!!!

    Comment by Chris — April 14, 2008 @ 4:56 pm

  6. Could this be changed to simply batch convert .eps and .ps files using Preview because Preview creates much smaller pdf files with Mac OS X 10.5.3 Quartz PDFContext than the regular unix pstopdf function?

    Ideally the workflow would mirror a selected set of nested folders into a separate but identical set of nested folders containing the converted .pdf versions of the files.

    This would be of enormous value to designers who need to convert large numbers of clipart collections from, the OSX unfriendly, .eps versions.

    Comment by Peter Breis — June 22, 2008 @ 7:10 pm

  7. Peter,
    Preview is not scriptable so I don’t believe your suggestion would work. I certainly do wish that Preview was scriptable. The Preview Automator actions also do not allow one to export to PDF (at least on Tiger, I don’t know about Leopard).

    Comment by Rhet Turnbull — July 27, 2008 @ 1:28 pm

  8. Rhet, is there some way to stretch the images so they fit the page?

    Comment by Matt — July 27, 2008 @ 11:33 pm

  9. this is awesome!!!! you just saved me hours of work!!!! :-D
    THANK YOU! THANK YOU! THANK YOU!

    Comment by James — November 5, 2008 @ 2:10 pm

  10. James: glad you found it useful! Cheers, –Rhet

    Comment by Rhet Turnbull — November 8, 2008 @ 6:00 pm

  11. Very very useful, thanks! This script will convert landscape images to portrait in PDF, if this is not desirable then open the PDF in Preview, select all, and go to Tools -> Rotate left.

    Comment by Maedi — April 19, 2009 @ 12:34 am

  12. @Maedi glad it’s useful! I don’t like the fact that landscape images are converted to portrait pages but havent’ found an easy way around that for the Automator action. If do figure it out, I’ll post an update. Cheers! -Rhet

    Comment by Rhet Turnbull — April 30, 2009 @ 2:18 pm

  13. This worked great except for one thing. It resized the images to 8.5 x 11. This happens with several other convert to pdf solutions I’ve tried. I’m assuming it has something to do with the CUPS/PPD? Is there a way to retatin the original size. I’m trying to save multiple jpeg files to single pdf.

    Comment by Keith — September 1, 2009 @ 3:31 pm

  14. This is an awesome script–the only bugs it’s given me are 1) it is doubling images and 2) it chokes if some of the image files have different file formats. I had a PNG mixed in with a couple hundred JPGs and kept getting the same error message. Finally, I left the PNG out of the mix and everything was fine.

    Still, I’d love to see the double vision go away. Any idea what’s causing it? I’m under Snow Leopard. Thanks for this great workflow!!

    Comment by thepete — December 5, 2009 @ 9:21 pm


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