Classic Mac OS Software (Discussions on Applications) > Application Development & Programming in the Classic Mac OS

Macro or scripting for MacOS 9 Classic

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rusmuscat:
Hello,

I am new here. I'm wondering if anyone can point me to a macro or scripting resource that will run under Classic emulation on MacOS Tiger. I am faced with a project involving converting many hundreds of Pagemaker 6.0 files that need to be exported to Postscript then Distilled via Acrobat Distiller. Hoping there's a way to cut down on the drudgery of the repeated tasks, which mostly involve basic menu pull-downs and mouse clicks on specific buttons.

Long ago I used Quickeys, but there doesn't seem to be anything resembling that still available.

Thanks in advance,

Vlad

robespierre:
I think the canonical answer would be Userland Frontier and/or AppleScript?
By System 7, and even moreso later, applications had scripting interfaces built in that could be activated by the above programs. It began in 7.0 with "high level AppleEvents", and then grew with OSA Vocabularies (Open Scripting Architecture) in 7.5 and above.
AppleScript is designed to resemble English, which is a strength and also a weakness. You can say things like "tell Pagemaker to open the file and export" if the application includes "export" in its Vocabulary. Later in OSX another tool called Automator was included that can combine workflows using AppleScripts, command line tools, and stored events in the Cocoa framework.

IIO:
you can even mix those by saving the classic/oS9 applescript as applications and then call those from OSX´ applescript.

note that the synthax between 9 and X is somewhat different.

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