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Is there any way to have OS X's Automator.app repeatedly take screen shots of a book in Adobe Digital Editions? So me doing the task involves:

  1. Cmd + Shift + 4
  2. space bar
  3. mouse click
  4. page down
  5. repeat…

Can this be automated?

Graham Miln
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Thomas
  • 1

1 Answers1

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Yes, this is possible.

You can use with Script Editor.app or Automator.app for your task. If you choose Automator.app, using the Run AppleScript action to embed your AppleScript snippets.

AppleScript: Simulating key presses

Take a look at using AppleScript to automate key presses, How do I automate a key press in AppleScript? An example from the top answer:

delay 0.5 -- time to release modifier keys if for example the script is run with command-R
tell application "System Events" to tell process "Adobe Digital Editions"
    try
        key down option
        delay 0.1
        click menu bar item 1 of menu bar 1
    end try
    key up option
end tell

AppleScript: Capturing screen shots

To take a screen shot, there are numerous approaches. This question is a good starting point, Take a screen shot and save to desktop with current time as the name:

set theDesktop to POSIX path of (path to desktop as string)
set theCurrentDate to current date
set shellCommand to "/usr/sbin/screencapture " & quoted form of (theDesktop & "Screen Shot" & theCurrentDate & ".png")
do shell script shellCommand

AppleScript: Mouse clicks

Simulating the mouse is trickier but likely possible, see Is there a way to simulate a mouse click anywhere on a screen in Dictate ?. AppleScript's GUI scripting is designed to interact with specific elements on the screen.

Aside: Copyright concerns

Please do not use this process to bypass copyright protection.

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Graham Miln
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