Hi, Sounds like you haven't added to your work flow. To add an action to a workflow, select it with up or down arrows and press enter. You can then interact with the workflow area and then interact with the action. When you interact with that action, there are radio buttons to choose the output format.
On Apr 1, 2015, at 1:12 PM, Chris Moore <[email protected]> wrote: Hi Barry, I followed your modified instructions to make a service. Your step 5 says to interact with the extract pdf text action to configure it to save it to txt or rtf. Once I select this action in the pdf table, I can’t figure out how to configure it. I’m new to automator, so you’ll have to bare with me. Chris > On Mar 31, 2015, at 10:38 PM, Barry Hadder <[email protected]> wrote: > > I would like to suggest a much simpler variation on my initial suggestion. > > In the workflow, Git rid of the applescript and get finder item actions, > change the input of the service to pdf file, and the application to Finder. > The only action you need is the extract pdf text. > > I wasn’t able to make this work at first, but I finally figured out that it > was due to the multi lingual pdf issue that I mentioned earlier. > So, if you prefer, you can just export a pdf to rtf within finder. > > > On Mar 31, 2015, at 8:24 PM, Barry Hadder <[email protected]> wrote: > > I don’t know of a way to select text in a pdf, but I can tell you how to get > all of the text into rtf or plain. > The easiest way is to create an Automator workflow like the following. > > 1. open Automator and choose the services template. > 2. Interact with the work flow area and set the service to have no input and > to only work with Preview. > 3. Add the following actions to the work flow: run apple script, get > specified finder items, and extract pdf text. You want them in that order. > 4. Interact with the run apple script action and enter the following in the > input field: > on run > tell application “Preview” > path of document of front window > end tell > end run > 5. Interact with the extract pdf text action and configure it to output > plain text or rtf as you prefer. > 6. Save it. > > That should get the job done. It should also show up in the services menu of > Preview. I’m sure you can think of ways to fine tune this idea to better > meet your needs. > Note that I have found that the extract pdf text action doesn’t seem to work > with multi lingual pdfs for some reason. > > > On Mar 31, 2015, at 4:10 PM, Chris Moore <[email protected]> wrote: > > The subject says it all. > When in the pdf viewer, how do I select text? I tried cmd+a which didn’t do > anything. > > The next question is how to add textedit to the services menu in pdf viewer? > > TIA > Chris > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "MacVisionaries" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an > email to [email protected]. > To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. > Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/macvisionaries. > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. > > Barry Hadder > [email protected] > > > > > Barry Hadder > [email protected] > > > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "MacVisionaries" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an > email to [email protected]. > To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. > Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/macvisionaries. > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "MacVisionaries" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/macvisionaries. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. Barry Hadder [email protected] -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "MacVisionaries" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/macvisionaries. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
