Automator advocacy

I love Automator. I truly do. It's a wonderful tool. I'd like to share something I use automator for that I think is pretty handy.

I love the Myst games. I'm sure most of you know the Myst games, and I love them. I love them so much that the small notes you keep during the games soon evolved into small pieces of art, piling on top of each other. Soon I realized that I should collect all of the maps, notes, hints and solutions to the games in a Myst book. So I bought a old book and had its papers replaced with new papers with an "antique" look to them. You can see the book here:

(It's in the lower left corner, click the image to magnify).

This was a really fun project, but I soon realised that not only was it hard to show the Myst community the book, it took good time to actually write in it continually. So I decided that I should try to create a digital version of the book. Said and done - soon the framework was done. I set up a Version Cue project with all the material, and since I use Wacom Cintiq both at work and at home, all illustrations are done by hand still, plus I can do them both at home and at work. Using Version Cue I keep the entire project (which, so far only includes the Myst game) together in one InDesign document.

This is extremely handy and easy. But this has nothing to do with Macs of course (other than Adobe CS2 being a much better tool on Macs).

No, Automator comes in when the InDesign document should be presented on my homepage, where other Myst-intrested people can see it (and, of course, marvel at it's beauty *cough*) :)

So, I export the book from InDesign to a PDF document, and then runs that PDF document through an Automator action:

- Get specified Finder items - Render PDF Pages as Images - RGB JPG - Scale Images - 800 pixels - Rename Finder Items - Make sequential - Make all number 2 digits long - Move Finder Items - To my done folder

So, by running this action, every page from the PDF is exported as a single JPG image and put in a folder named "page01.jpg", "page02.jpg" and so on. After that, I upload the images to my server and have a PHP script that generates a XML file that in turns feed a Flash object that makes the pages "flippable". The end result can be seen here:

Click the Myst book and a popup shows where you can read the book, created in InDesign, illustrated by hand using Wacom Cintoqs and then exported by Automator.

I don't know about you, but I think it's pretty cool. :-D

-- Sandman.net