So in the course of publishing these sections of Flatland, I have found I needed to reformat and clean them up (sometimes for odd line breaks, other times for artifacts that textile would misinterpret). It boiled down to a few common operations, and after reading Gruber’s writeup on how AppleScript-ability makes for a world-beating OS X app, it struck me that I have rarely used Applescript in OS X. I found myself playing with some the scripts that come with ecto (Thanks, Adriaan.) and realized it was worth another look.
So this time, when I copied from ecto to TextWrangler to use the search and replace options there, I turned on the Recording option in the Scripts menu and let it log my movements. The result?
tell application “TextWrangler”
activate
replace ”
” using “•” searching in text 1 of text document 1 options {search mode:literal, starting at top:true, wrap around:false, backwards:false, case sensitive:false, match words:false, extend selection:false}
replace ”
” using ” ” searching in text 1 of text document 1 options {search mode:literal, starting at top:true, wrap around:false, backwards:false, case sensitive:false, match words:false, extend selection:false}
replace “•” using ”
” searching in text 1 of text document 1 options {search mode:literal, starting at top:true, wrap around:false, backwards:false, case sensitive:false, match words:false, extend selection:false}
replace “–” using ” — ” searching in text 1 of text document 1 options {search mode:literal, starting at top:true, wrap around:false, backwards:false, case sensitive:false, match words:false, extend selection:false}
replace ” ” using ” ” searching in text 1 of text document 1 options {search mode:literal, starting at top:true, wrap around:false, backwards:false, case sensitive:false, match words:false, extend selection:false}
end tell
And it works just fine. Faster than keystrokes, I can attest to that. I couldn’t have written this, based on what I know now, but I can now pick this apart and add or adjust some of the steps, with this as a template.
NB: if you try this — recording some steps you already perform — the results are stored in ~/Library/Application Support/${Application}/Scripts. You can then open your handiwork in the Script Editor (accessible through the Scripts menu) and see what you ended up with.
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