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The first thing I want to do is duplicate my files. We need to start grabbing things from the sidebar to build our Automator workflow. Nothing beats the simplicity of dropping files into a folder, and it’s perfect for getting images ready for email distribution.įirst, let’s start by creating what Automator calls a “folder action.” This is an action that’s run on any file added to a given folder, like a workflow attached to a specific directory.Īt first, we’ll have nothing in our queue. While many image editing programs include built-in batch functionality, it can be difficult to get a handle on how they work. Resizing images is one of the more tedious tasks you can undertake on a computer. Situation 1: Resizing Images with Automator Workflows

It has a much smaller set of possible operations, but since Automator workflows are made from built-in processes, it’s easier to chain things together than to try and use AppleScript’s extensive dictionary of user-supplied functions. It’s actually not that different from AppleScript. By adopting an “if this, then that” approach to managing complex tasks, it makes it easier for non-expert users to set up reasonably complex processes. Designed to bring software automation to non-programmers, Automator workflows use a simple grammar that will be familiar to any user of IFTTT. On a related note, if you’d rather dodge the AppleScripting all together then you could try out our handy Pages Automator Actions.MacOS’s Automator is a little-known but highly useful piece of bundled software. Note that it’s up to you to make sure that the documents you drop actually are Pages documents – the script doesn’t check and may error if you drop the wrong type of documents. Save the workflow and you should now have an app that you can drop Pages documents on. Set theName to (characters 1 thru -7 of theDocName) as textĮxport theDoc as PDF to file ((theFilesFolder & theName & ".pdf") as text) Set theFilesFolder to (folder of theFile) as text Replace all the purple text in the action with the following AppleScript: Next, drag a “Run AppleScript” workflow into your workflow so you have something that looks like this: Let’s look at how to do that.įirst, launch Automator (you’ll find it in your Mac’s Applications folder). Luckily, Pages is AppleScriptable so we can make our own action. Unfortunately, Pages doesn’t ship with Automator actions (although there are some funky third party options) The obvious way to make such an app is with Automator. It’d be great to make an app which we could drop our Pages files on and have them made into PDFs. In the spirit of sharing the knowledge, here’s how we did it.

Recently we were asked how to use Automator to convert Apple Pages documents into PDFs.