Question

I want to create an application on a Mac to convert multiple files (txt, pdf, doc, html, etc) to a single pdf file that can be printed. The real point is that if you have 50 texts you don’t have to open every single file and click command-p.

I’m not quite sure whether the best way to do this is by creating a full-fledged app or an automator plugin (or something else). If I remember correctly there’s a filter in mac os’s terminal that can convert files to pdf (but I forgot what it’s called).

So would an automator plugin do this well, or shall I make an app for this? Can you provide me advantages for each answer?

I’ve done cocoa touch programming before so I can write objective-c quite well.

Answer 1

Use appscript, either as an action in an automator script or standalone. The advantage is that it is very simple and will take you a fraction of the time to write an app.

Here is something very close to what you want. It sets up a drop-folder and each file dragged onto it is printed (you can use multiple-select to get what you want). It uses Apple Works 6 which doesn’t support the file-types that you want.

To modify it to use the Preview application instead you need to change the tell command in the script and then google the dictionary for Preview to check which verb to use for printing.