www.nickhodge.com

File­Maker Pro to Pho­toshop 7.0

Tak­ing data from File­Maker Pro 5.5 to Pho­toshop 7.0 is simple with AppleScript. So simple, I chal­lenged myself to write the code on the flight from Sydney to Auck­land on the Pho­toshop 7.0 User Conference/Roadshow/Tour in May. After a little modi­fic­a­tion “in the shop”, and com­ments from the great Shane Stan­ley, here it is in all its glory!

Firstly, lets look at the data­base sup­plied. This is quite simple: there are 3 fields and three records. The very import­ant field is the file­name pointer field. This con­tains the file name of the tem­plate for this record:

The defin­i­tions of the fields is import­ant. The script uses the names of the fields to point out layer names in the Pho­toshop tem­plate files:

This is the tem­plate Pho­toshop file. Notice the layer name of the text layer. Again, these layer names are used by the script as the link­age between File­Maker Pro and Pho­toshop 7.0:

The end res­ult in the file sys­tem. It is very import­ant that you check the prop­er­ties at the top of the AppleScript to point to dir­ect­or­ies you would like the script to look for the source tem­plates and where to place the end res­ults:

The final JPEG as dis­played in the browser, this time with the data inser­ted by this script:

The File­Maker Pro data­base and Script is avail­able for down­load: file­maker to pho­toshop 1.0.sit

I have only tested this on MacOS X 10.1.4 with Pho­toshop 7.0. You will also need the Pho­toshop 7.0 Script­ing Plu­gin 1.0.2a (Mac) avail­able from the Adobe web site.

Com­ments are welcome!