In a previous rant I was trying to make an AppleScript program to convert my RIFF files to GIF. With some help from the Apple Support Discussions web site, I have finally come up with a workable solution. I am going to describe it here, partly because I expect I shall need reminding when I need to perform this task, in about a year's time.
Save as GIF
The toughest part is persuading Corel Painter to save a file as a GIF, under the control of my program. Here I present the working version of the procedure that does that.
We start by activating Painter and then talking to it via the System Events thingie (the UI scripting component):
(* Attempt to write the front-most image as a GIF file.
Will fail if there is already a file of that name. *)
on save_front_image_as_gif(gifs_folder)
tell application "Corel Painter 8"
activate
end tell
tell application "System Events"
tell process "Corel Painter 8"
click menu item "Clone" of menu 1 of menu bar item "File" of menu bar 1
Why clone the image? To avoid the extra dialogue that Painter throws up warning me that there is more than one layer in the picture. I would then have to work out how to make AppleScript program recognize this dialogue and dismiss it. The cloned image has only one layer, which avoids the dialogue.
Now we show the Save As dialogue:
click menu item "Save As..." of menu 1 of menu bar item "File" of menu bar 1
One of the things I did not know how to discover was the precise spelling of 'Save As...': was the ellipsis a single Unicode character U+2026 (…) or just three dots (...)? they look the same on the screen, and Apple's UI Element Inspector does not allow me to copy and paste the text. In the end the UI Browser from PreFab solves this problem for me: it shows the incantation needed to click the menu item in a proper text box.
The next problem is ensuring that the GIF is saved in the correct directory.
There is a way to do this, by faking an obscure keyboard shortcut: control-/
shows a dialogue for entering a directory name. The parameter gifs_folder will
be a Finder file object, and we have to convert that to a directory name using
an incantation I had to learn from via Google:
(* Set the output directory using an obscure keyboard shortcut. *)
keystroke "/" using {control down}
delay 1
tell window 1
set gifs_dir_name to POSIX path of (gifs_folder as alias)
set value of text field 1 to gifs_dir_name
click button "Go"
end tell
I don't know why 'as alias' is required; it just is.
Our next task is to trim the prefix Clone of from the file name. The delay
1 seems to be required to ensure that we don't ask for the value before the
dialogue's initialization code has finished running.
tell window "Save"
(* Edit the file name to not start with 'clone of' *)
delay 1
set the_file_name to value of text field 1
if the_file_name starts with "Clone of " then
set the_file_name to text 10 thru (length of the_file_name) of the_file_name
end if
set the value of text field 1 to the_file_name
Finally, we need to tell it to save as GIF. The problem here was that the menu
button I needed to manipulate is inside a panel that UI Element Inspector said
was unknown. You can't refer to a widget using the word unknown, since
unknown is a keyword. From the kind people on the Apple Discussions
forums I discoverd that the things that are called 'controls' in Windows and
'widgets' on Unix systems are called 'UI elements' on the Mac, and that you can
get a list of all UI elements using the AppleScript reference every UI
element.
(* Set the file format to GIF *)
click pop up button 1 of UI element 9
click menu item "GIF" of menu 1 of pop up button 1 of UI element 9
Now that is done it is time to click Save and then deal with the GIF Options dialogue that appears next. When the file is saved we close the window containing the cloned image, and also the image we started with.
click button "Save"
end tell
delay 1
tell window "Save as GIF Options"
click radio button "16 Colors"
if value of checkbox "Interlaced" = 0 then
click checkbox "Interlaced"
end if
keystroke return
end tell
(* Now close the document we just saved. *)
delay 1
keystroke "W" using command down
(* Now close the document we cloned in the first place. *)
delay 1
keystroke "W" using command down
end tell
end tell
end save_front_image_as_gif
That was the hardest part of getting the script to work. All we need to do now is work out which files need updating, and then open each file in turn and invoke that procedure.
Walking the Directory Tree, or Searching the Folder Hierarchy
To look for files my AppleScript program talks to the Finder. The technique is
pretty standard: we keep a list called pending_folders of folders that have
not been scanned yet; at first this contains just the starting directory. As we
scan a directory, we add its subdirectories to the list. When the list is empty,
we are done.
Because AppleScript dates back to Mac OS 9, and the old Macintosh file system
had its own way of writing file names, and because file names in AppleScript are
objects rather than mere strings, you need translate your nice Unix file names
in to Mac OS 9 format: as an example, /Users/pdc/foo becomes folder
"Users:pdc:foo" of startup disk.
tell application "Finder"
set desired_count to 1000
set root_folder to folder "Macintosh HD:Users:pdc:foo"
set pages_folder to folder "pages" of root_folder
set gifs_folder to folder "External Disc:PRINT:gifs"
set processed_count to 0
There is a complication because AppleScript does not appear to have a way to remove an item from the list if the list contains only one item! E. W. Dijkstra argues that life is easier if lists are numbered starting at 0 and ranges are defined to include their lower bound and not their upper bound; AppleScript gets both of these wrong. There are several ways to work around this problem; the approach I used was to add an extra element to the list so that it never goes below one element.
set pending_folders to {pages_folder, "--worst programming language EVAR--"}
repeat while processed_count < desired_count and length of pending_folders > 1
set a_folder to item 1 of pending_folders
set pending_folders to items 2 thru (length of pending_folders) of pending_folders
set more_folders to every folder of a_folder
set pending_folders to more_folders & pending_folders
set riff_files to every document file of a_folder whose file type = "RIFF"
repeat with riff_file in riff_files
if my maybe_process_file(riff_file, gifs_folder) then
set processed_count to processed_count + 1
if processed_count >= desired_count then
exit repeat
end if
end if
end repeat
end repeat
if processed_count < desired_count then
display dialog "ThatÕs all, folks"
end if
end tell
What's all that fuss with processed_count and desired_count about? I
added all that so that while I was testing the script I could change
desired_count to limit the script to creating only one file: that way, if it
went horribly wrong, the number of spurious files to clean up would be small.
Processing One File (Maybe)
The function maybe_process_file checks whether the file that has been found
needs to be processed or not. In this case, 'processed' means saving the GIF
version in gifs_folder.
to maybe_process_file(riff_file, gifs_folder)
tell application "Finder"
set gif_name to name of riff_file
if gif_name ends with ".rif" then
set gif_name to text 1 thru ((length of gif_name) - 4) of gif_name
end if
set gif_name to gif_name & ".gif"
set is_gif_needed to (not (exists document file gif_name of gifs_folder))
The parameter riff_file is a Finder file-name object; name of gives the last
component of its full file name (such as bar.rif, or, in a few cases, just
plain baz, with no suffix). We set gif_name to this with .rif changed to
.gif, and then check whether this file already exists.
Even if the file exists, it is possible that it is out of date. This happens when the RIFF file is updated and the GIF has not been updated yet. We check for this by asking Finder for the modification dates of the files. If an out-of-date file exists, then we delete it now; if we did not, then when we go to save the file, an extra dialogue box would appear, asking us whether we want to overwrite the exsting file, and this would cause our script to fail.
(* Also process file if GIF is older than RIFF *)
if not is_gif_needed then
set gif_file to file gif_name of gifs_folder
set riff_time to modification date of riff_file
set gif_time to modification date of gif_file
if gif_time < riff_time then
delete gif_file
set is_gif_needed to true
end if
end if
if is_gif_needed then
my process_file(riff_file, gifs_folder)
return true
end if
return false
end tell
end maybe_process_file
This procedure and the loop for walking the folder hierarchy are fairly generic:
they could be used for any task that needs to do something for every file in a
set of folders. The only thing we would need to change to do a
different 'something' is process_file. This part is quite short:
to process_file(riff_file, gifs_folder)
tell application "Finder" to open riff_file
my save_front_image_as_gif(gifs_folder)
end process_file
That's pretty much it. The main things I need to remember from this are:
- 'UI element';
- UI Element Browser (it helps a lot!); and
POSIX path (... as alias).
Once this script was working it takes several hours to convert the couple of hundred drawings I have. Still, now it's done once, it will take much less time to update the pile o' GIFs when only a small number of RIFFs have been edited.