Two questions about printing to Adobe PDF...

Scripting Forums AppleScript | Mac OS X
#1

Hi everyone. I’ve been gone for a while. Good to be back. Very rusty, though.

I think this is more of a distiller question than a Word question…

Word 2008 has depreciated “print out” and now uses the print command from the standard suite, so the fact that I’m calling the command from word isn’t relevant, I don’t think. This question could just as easily apply to any app that uses that command to print to PDF using Adobe’s method.

Dictionary:

My function…

on word2pdf(this_item) -- this sub-routine processes the files	
	tell application "Microsoft Word"
		open (this_item as string)
		delay 1
		print the front document with properties {target printer:"Adobe PDF 9.0", copies:1, error handling:detailed} without print dialog
		close front document saving no
	end tell
end word2pdf

It seems to work just great, but now I have to move on to the rest of my workflow and there are some issues.

  1. The printing application (e.g. Word) seems to be dumping postscript and then the Adobe Print Driver steps in and converts that that to PDF. How can the script know when the pdf file has been created? Is there a way to ask the printer if it’s busy or still has files in queue? Or should I loop delay loop testing for the completed PDF file until I see it on disk?

  2. The PDF file is showing up on my desktop, with a name that seems to be generated by the print driver. If the incoming file is some:folder:path:FILE.doc", the finished PDF is “~:desktop:Microsoft Word - FILE.doc.pdf”. Is there any way to influence the output file’s destination or file name, other than moving/renaming the file after it’s been created? That’s do-able, but not too clean. Is there a way to tell an app that uses standard suite’s print command to dump to postscript? If there were, I could script Distiller to do the rest, like one might do with a Quark to PDF workflow.

Thanks!

  • Note to anyone looking here because they need to do word2pdf conversions…
    You can just do
save as the front document file name "Macintosh HD:Users:me:Desktop:completed:FILE.pdf" file format format PDF

but in the case of this script, the customer insists that the ps be ripped by Adobe rather than Mac OS X Quartz.