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By Root 1567 0

department uses in-house, and there is a checklist enumerating certain details of the form the manuscript should take. Looking over this checklist, I find an entry from the illustration department informing me that I'm supposed to follow certain rules about the naming of the files that contain the illustrations, and that I'm to submit a list of illustrations providing the number, name, and caption of each figure. Table A-1 presents the example the illustration department provides.

Table A-1. How the O'Reilly illustration department wants figure files named

Fig. No.

Filename

Caption (or description)

1-1

wfi_0101.eps

Overview of the Windows NT operating system environment.

1-2

wfi_0102.eps

Name space presented by the Object Manager.

1-3

wfi_0103.eps

Filter drivers in the driver hierarchy.

2-1

wfi_0201.eps

Local File System.

2-2

wfi_0202.eps

Hierarchical name space for directories and files.

As the example shows, the illustration department would like each illustration file named according to its place in the book. Each name starts with some letters identifying the book, followed by an underscore. Then there are two digits signifying the number of the chapter in which the figure appears. Then there are two more digits signifying the relative position of the figure within the chapter. Finally, there's the suffix indicating what kind of file it is. The illustration department would also like me to attach a list that looks like the table, associating figure numbers, filenames, and captions.

Naturally, as I've been writing the book, I haven't done any of that. It wouldn't have made sense, because I didn't know, as I wrote the book, exactly how many chapters there would be and what order they would be in, and exactly what illustrations there would be and what order they would be in. I've been cutting and pasting and rearranging right up until the last moment. My illustration files simply have whatever names I gave them at the time of creation; these names are generally pretty meaningless, and in the Finder they appear in alphabetical order, which is not at all the order in which they appear in the book. For example, here are the names of the illustration files for Chapter 2, as they appear in the Finder:

automator.eps

automator2.eps

cocoa.eps

fileMaker1.eps

fileMaker2.eps

radio.eps

scriptDebugger.eps

scriptDebuggerDict.eps

scriptEditor.eps

scriptEditorDict.eps

Now, however, the proverbial last moment has arrived. So it's time for me to grapple with the illustration department's requirements. The problem, therefore, is to rename these files in accordance with the chapter in which they appear and their order of appearance within it. Clearly I'm going to have to work in two places at once. In FrameMaker, I need to look at each illustration in order, and see what file on disk it corresponds to. In the Finder, I need to change the name of that file. Then, back in FrameMaker, I need to change the reference for each illustration, so that it points to the correct file under its new name.

This promises to be a massively painful, tedious, and error-prone task—not something I'm looking forward to. Then I get an idea. Adobe FrameMaker is scriptable; in fact, it's extraordinarily scriptable. And so is the Finder. Perhaps this task can be automated using AppleScript.

A Day in the Life

Although I know that FrameMaker is scriptable, I have no idea how to script it. I haven't the slightest notion how to talk to FrameMaker, using AppleScript, about the illustrations in my manuscript. So the first thing I need to do is to try to find this out.

Caught in the Web of Words

My starting place, as with any new AppleScript programming task, is the dictionary of the application I'm going to be talking to, where I examine the terminology I can use in speaking to this application with AppleScript. To see FrameMaker's dictionary, I start up Apple's Script Editor, open the Library window, add FrameMaker to the library, and double-click its icon in the Library window. The dictionary opens, as shown