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