Postscript Automator Actions

Having played with Automator some yesterday I thought it would be interesting to create an Automator action to perform the Postscript manipulation. This would mean that I could package the scripts together in a workflow to make producing the PDFs for my subjects even easier...

Creating an Automator action is actually quite easy. It basically uses an architecture inspired by Unix pipes. You can pass output from one action to the input of the next. I decided to create script actions as I already had the bash script all worked out. With this script the input is passed via the standard input. Automator also allows you to provide arguments via a simple user interface. These arguments are then passed in as environment variables. The following script illustrates the Postscript to PDF Automator action...

#!/usr/bin/env sh

if [ -e "$PS2PDFBIN" ]; then

while read line; do

if [ -e "$line" ]; then
FILETYPE=`/usr/bin/file -b -i "$line"`
if [ "$FILETYPE" = "application/postscript" ]; then

OUTDIR=`/usr/bin/dirname "$line"`
FBASE=`/usr/bin/basename "$line" .ps`
OUTNAME="${OUTDIR}/${FBASE}.pdf"

typeset -i I=1

while [ -e $OUTNAME ]
do
  OUTNAME="${OUTDIR}/${FBASE}.$I.pdf"

  I=$I+1
done

PATH=$PATH:`/usr/bin/dirname "$PS2PDFBIN"`
$PS2PDFBIN -q -sPAPERSIZE="$PAPER" -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH -sDEVICE=pdfwrite "$line" "$OUTNAME"

/bin/echo "$OUTNAME"
else
/bin/echo $line
fi

else
/bin/echo $line
fi
done
else

echo "Cannot locate executable: '$PS2PDFBIN'" 1>&2
exit 1
fi

I will upload the action bundles soon if anyone is interested...