In the Beginning..... there was.....

[Yorkshireman]

Folks, 

I'm new here.  I need to do some conversions - extractions really, of text (.txt) from pages documents.  So I've been looking at AppleScript, then I look into automator - some hundreds of these to do, so mechanisation needed.

 

That led me to Alfred.   Here I am.  and here I'm stuck. 

 

Loaded the dmg, fire it up, read the help, been to the forum, logged in, had an experiment with the impressive search, so start making a workflow.  

The help text says to begin at the workflow tab of the preferences pane and add a new workflow.  But I don't see such an option.  Aha - workflows need advanced and subscription facilities for access to more stuff. 

I'm OK with that - I really am

But, 

I don't see a way to experiment and trial the product without buying.   Nothing I have come across suggests that Pages is supported.  And if it is - can I use Alfred's capability ?  

 

Now - I come at this from a background that goes back to the very first IBM PC's and DOS 1.0   I have a bit of an expectation of documentation which lays out what is possible, the extent of what the tool will do, and a rock solid description to lead you through something - like 'Hello World' that will show the basics of the product.  

 

SO - do I have to buy something?  or can someone say if I can control the Pages functionality with Alfred?  

 

Thanks all

 

ARW

 

 

 

[deanishe]

Welcome to't forum, fellow son of God's own country.

 

22 minutes ago, Yorkshireman said:

Nothing I have come across suggests that Pages is supported.

 

It's not. Alfred isn't that kind of app. It's fundamentally a launcher, not a general automation tool. It's marvellous for finding and running stuff, but Alfred's native automation capabilities don't extend much beyond getting the selected text from an application and telling an application to open something.

 

Workflows essentially allow you to use Alfred as the user interface to your own scripts. There are a whole lot of workflows that manipulate other applications or display their data in Alfred, but the workflows' authors coded all that manipulation and extraction themselves with little help from Alfred.

 

As far as your use case goes, Alfred can give you a bunch of ways to execute your Pages extraction task, but it can't help you much with the task itself. The gold standard automation app for making other apps do stuff is Keyboard Maestro.

 

All that said, our lovely forum members are heavily into automation (as you might expect), so if you can describe exactly what you're trying to achieve in more detail, there's a good chance someone here can help you.