I like things to be automated, everything. Coffee in the morning, bill pa
yment, cycling the cable modem when it goes wonky, everything. The adage used to be, if you do something twice, automate it. I think it should be, “if you do anything, automate it, you will likely have to do it one more time”.
So I used to automate stuff like converting DOCX to PDF and PPTX to PDF on Windows all the time. But for the past two years, after moving to a Mac this is one thing that I’ve not been able to automate, and it bugged me, a lot.
No longer.
I had to make a presentation which went with a descriptive document, and I wanted to submit the whole thing as a PDF. Try as I might, Powerpoint and Word on the Mac would not make this easy.
It is disgusting that I had to resort to Applescript + Automator to do this.
It is a horrible way to do it, but yes, it works.
Now, before the Mac purists flame me for using Microsoft Word, and Microsoft Powerpoint, let me point out that the Mac default tools don’t make it any easier. Apple Keynote does not appear to offer a solution to this either, you have to resort to automator for this too.
So, eventually, I had to resort to automation based on those two links to make two PDFs and then this to combine them into a single PDF.
This is shitty, horrible, and I am using it now. But, do you know of some other solution, using simple python, and not having to install LibreOffice or a handful of other tools? Isn’t this a solved problem? If not, I wonder why?
Hype Cycles 