Need Help Automating FrameMaker Processes

[Bill Briggs]

At 6:37 PM +0100 4/28/06, Steve Rickaby wrote:
>AppleScript is niche, FrameScript is niche.

 Writing AppleScript for FrameMaker is as "nichy" as it gets. I know maybe half a dozen people who use AppleScript with FrameMaker. I think all but one of them is on this list. And it's truly a pity that it is so niche. And it's a pity because the stuff you can do with it in terms of workflow are truly awesome. Just as an example, I wrote a manuscript cleaner once to clean up and apply a template to documents I was setting for the local government. It reduced a 6 hour manual job (even if you knew all of the ways to speed up the cleanup with global changes, etc) into a double click. The script cleaned a 100 page manuscript in about 15 minutes. There were about 30 tests run on each paragraph (fixed the punctuation of latinisms, turned double hyphens to proper dashes, deleted empty paragraphs, turned manually numbered paragraphs into proper autonumbered lists, etc.), and in the end there was very little manual work to do cleaning up tables. It even applied the template to the raw text file. You've got to love something that does this. Took three hours to write the script, so it saved three hours the first time it was used.

  But AppleScript's interapplication communication is its big benefit. And whoever said that Apple doesn't do enough to promote it is right. I write scripts every day of life, and have saved myself thousands of hours of manual drudgery in the process. The UNIX shell and the ability of AppleScript to run shell scripts and process stdout has only magnified that power exponentially. Most Mac users I know are blissfully ignorant of both of these things (AppleScript and the UNIX shell). I can't imagine how they get anything done. I'd go crazy doing things manually that I see people doing on their Macs every day.

 Okay. I'm going home to have a beer.

 - web