Auto PDF Creation in Mac OS X

[Tigerstrike]

Good afternoon forum,

I have a database which I use to send out customer and vendor correspondence. Until now we've simply printed out the letters and faxed them off. Now that we have email addresses for most of our contacts, I'd like to be able to automatically generate an email with the appropriate letter attached as a PDF. I've gotten the email part down using the "Send Mail" script step. Here's my question: Is there an easy way to generate a PDF in Mac OS X & FM 6.x? Right now my script stops at the print command which allows me to manually do a "save as PDF" in the Mac OS X print box, then I manually save over the last version of the file (something.pdf), then my script continues and does the email creation attaching the file I just created/saved. Surely there's got to be a simpler/easier way?

Thanks for any/all help!

Tigerstrike

[QuinTech]

Hi Tiger, i have PDF995 (a nice shareware PDF generator) on my machine and i can't see any way to feed a filename from Filemaker to the PDF writer. You'll need some mechanism for passing a filename to the print driver, otherwise it's impossible to generate a PDF. It's possible the maker of the PDF writer you use could give you instructions on how to feed a filename from other applications into their program; you should look into their documentation. What do you use for making your PDFs?

Jerry

[dbruggmann]

I'm quite sure it's quite easy to be done with Apple Script. But my knowledge is far beyond the level to give you some advice. But there's a

[Fridolin]

The problem is the filename. If You're happy with a generic file name You can set it up in the script, just click options. Otherwise You need Applescript, but that's beyond my skills.

Fridolin!

[QuinTech]

Fridolin! Is that option available in version 6, or is it new to 7?

J

[Fridolin]

Sorry! A feature in Mac OS X. You can print PDF-files from any app because it's using PDF to draw up the screen.