Learning AppleScript for Beginners » AppleScript

Scripting Primer for Pages Documents

admin — Tue, 27 Sep 2011 23:26:34 +0000

If you have used AppleWorks 6 in the past, this script for Pages should be easy to follow, although the syntax is not exactly the same as AppleWorks.

In fact, the Pages application was derived from AppleWorks 6 ! To see the similarities (and the differences) check out some of my other posts on AppleWorks.

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Security Issues with GUI and the Internet

admin — Sun, 27 Mar 2011 17:09:13 +0000

GUI Scripting is a great way to script those applications that do not have a scripting vocabulary and for those with limited scripting support. You may, however, have thought to yourself: “Is it really a good idea to leave it enabled all of the time, especially when I work on the internet a lot?” There [...]

Converting HTML to Text Format

admin — Wed, 02 Mar 2011 18:24:08 +0000

Often, I copy text from one of my posts into a text file for further editing (typos, script errors etc) only to find that I have copied the HTML too, which is not good since it’s not usually the HTML that I want to edit, and therefore makes it difficult to focus on what I [...]

Getting Acquainted with General GUI Terms and Objects

admin — Sat, 12 Feb 2011 14:53:43 +0000

AppleScript GUI is for many an intriguing aspect of AppleScripting, yet, as straightforward as it seems on the surface, successfully compiling a script can be a lot of trial-and-error and frustration.

In this post, I will get you started with 3 good examples of GUI [...]

Extracting Text Using Offset and Reverse vs Text Item Delimiters

admin — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 18:13:53 +0000

There are times when you want to extract part of a text string from another for some specific purpose. There are two basic methods and each has its advantages and disadvantages. We’ll start with a combination of offset and reverse to remove the suffix from “seattleSunset.jpg”:

set jpgFile to characters of "seattleSunset.jpg" –This gives us [...]

Formatting and Editing Text Objects with Word 2008

admin — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 21:08:14 +0000

While Microsoft has its own scripting language (Visual Basic for Applications or ‘VBA’) to do all (most) of the same things as presented here, it is rather clunky and difficult to use compared with the more natural syntax of AppleScript.

Here we will look at some of the most necessary scripting elements for Word 2008 [...]

Using Aliases and POSIX Paths

admin — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 22:18:53 +0000

Over the time that I have been writing AppleScripts, I have found that one of the most difficult, if not frustrating, tasks of writing scripts is referencing files by path so that they can be accessed by other applications.

As you’ll see below, creating a reference that is understandable by the Finder is fairly [...]

Using Info Window Data to Write Scripts

admin — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 21:33:43 +0000

In the initial section of this post, I leave the AppleScript code formatted as it would appear in the Script Editor pane to show that keywords, statements and other expressions that appear in blue in the Script Editor are part of the AppleScript language and syntax and knowing that is helpful when writing scripts.

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AppleScript for Sending Email with Apple Mail

admin — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 22:26:42 +0000

This is a very straightforward script to send data to Apple’s Mail application. There isn’t really anything difficult here. It should suffice to note here the AppleScript terms and expressions used here that are unique to the Mail application. You’ll often find that an application has, along with the standard terms that are used [...]

Concatenation or Parsing and Editing of Text Strings

admin — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 19:34:31 +0000

In this section we deal with various methods to extract different parts of text from lists and other text and at the end, how to put it all together to make a new text string. This is sort of lengthy, but it is pretty easy to follow,

First, to extract text from a list. Both [...]