After several days trying to learn AppleScript from this forum and others and after having thoroughly browsed the AppleScript Language Guide. well, I can’t see the forest for the trees. I feel like I know more than necessary about objects, properties, elements, commands and such; yet, I’m unable to script anything more than the simplest of tasks. When I read example scripts, I seem to be missing simple but essential information. breathe. Anyway here’s what I want to do.
I write extensively in polytonic (ancient) Greek with GreekKeys. Before unicode this meant using special fonts (e.g., Kadmos-Sal+, Athenian, etc.); I am in the process of migrating to unicode and would like to convert my old documents (several hundred). I use a decent converter, GreekKeysConverter; however, it requires opening each document, saving as an .rtf file, running the conversion and then saving back to a .doc file and changing the name. To make matters worse, many of my older docs use the font Kadmos-Sal+ that is (I believe) not readable by the converter; thus I must global replace Kadmos with Athenian before running the conversion (I use Word 2004 macros for this).
Ideally, I could write one or more scripts to do all of this; although, if I had to do just the conversion by hand, this would be a significant improvement. It seems like TextEdit would be the way to go, for the .rtf to .doc conversions. Perhaps there is a more efficient Unicode converter out there in AppleScript land? Why am I unable to search my folders for files containing Kadmos-Sal+? I thought this would be an obvious metadata search with Spotlight, I guess not. Finally, one significant advantage would be to maintain my current folder structure.
Thanks to all readers for your patience with us Newbies.
ES
Model: iMac G5 (rev2)
AppleScript: 1.1
Browser: Safari 412
Operating System: Mac OS X (10.4)