At 12:20 pm -0800 16/1/06, Brian Johnson wrote:

>This last digest has lots of food for thought! To start digesting, I 
>copied and pasted Shane's script to a new file, saved it as a .scpt, 
>dropped it innto my scripts folder, and ran it. Works great, except 
>the postscript opens into Apple's TextEdit rather than Preview. The 
>file _is_ postscript, but the name ends in .txt. Obviously, TextEdit 
>renders it as text, so it's not terribly useful. I checked -- 
>/Applications/Preview.app exists, so how's it getting ahold of 
>TextEdit?

That's very odd. On my system it saves pdfs to /tmp

set _manpage to quoted form of text returned of ¬
	(display dialog "Command to man:" default answer "")
do shell script "man -t " & _manpage & " | open -f -a preview"

Since -t means groff -Tps and that means PostScriptoutput 
(postprocessor isgrops) among all sorts of other creatures, I can't 
see how you're getting a .txt output, and Preview is the only app in 
a standard installation that will open a PostScript file.

Here are the files created when I run the script:

Eremita:/private/tmp/PreviewTemp.y2SQEc jd$ ls
3E21C264-8787-4651-A42C-9CC48F87C03A-8013-0000082FE4C36648.pdf
57E711AB-49E6-47DA-9659-8A7E5127681E-8629-00000920FCD75655.pdf
85B75893-52FD-4BCB-BFAD-AB5F58400EDE-8715-0000093DF095F97A.pdf
91AFEEE0-BA84-42D0-AD39-2D96D67B3971-8548-0000090B6257D3C6.pdf
BDB37ED9-9A46-4447-A6DB-0D98293DC30B-8564-0000090D5C5EEDFD.pdf


What I'd like is to have the files named to reflect the name of the 
man pages I'm reading rather than reminding me of Microsoft get-in 
codes.

You might try this instead, which does use useful names:


--------
set x to text returned of ¬
   (display dialog "Command to man:" default answer "")
do shell script ¬
   "cd /tmp;man -t " &x& " > " &x& ".ps; open -a preview " &x& ".ps"
--------

JD