www.nickhodge.com

Dis­tilling PDF into JPEG Pho­toshop 7.0’s script­ing on Windows

Prob­lem from a cus­tomer: they want to take a dir­ect­ory of PDFs and make mini JPEGs that are pre­views of the spreads.

So, out with the new­est Adobe applic­a­tion on the block: Pho­toshop 7.0. Pho­toshop 7.0 has a major new addi­tion: Script­ab­il­ity. Using AppleScript on MacOS, VB (COM) script­ing on Win­dows and Javas­cript on both plat­forms, you can write scripts that inter­act with Pho­toshop and other applic­a­tions. For scripters, this is the holy grail. From my first days at Adobe, one of the gurus of Apple­Script­ing Shane Stan­ley, houn­ded me about Pho­toshop script­ab­il­ity. In Pho­toshop 7.0, we’ve finally delivered.

This ver­sion is an applic­a­tion writ­ten in Visual Basic. Using the Script­ing Object (FileSys­tem object) and some UI classes to do the “watch­ing” and dir­ect­ory selec­tion, we look in a dir­ect­ory you nom­in­ate and place the res­ult­ing PDF and JPEGs into the des­tin­a­tion directory.

You will need the Script­ing plu­gin for Pho­toshop 7.0 Win­dows: Pho­toshop 7.0 Script­ing Plu­gin 1.0.2a (Win)

And my com­piled script, and source which are here:    Moon­shine for Win­dows (ZIP)