I came across an online manual that we put online to read like a book — you had to turn each page by clicking on an on-screen arrow or pressing the left-arrow and right-arrow keys to navigate.
I wrote this small AppleScript to take over the duty of turning the pages.
repeat 1 times
tell application "System Events" to key code 26 using {shift down, command down}
activate application "Snapz Pro X" -- script pressess shift-command-f7 (my hotkey for snapz pro x)
tell application "System Events" to key code 76 -- script presses enter to use last-used selection
activate application "Snapz Pro X"
tell application "System Events" to key code 76 -- script presses enter to capture the selected region
activate application "Firefox"
tell application "System Events" to key code 48 -- press tab to make the viewport active
tell application "System Events" to key code 124 -- press right arrow to move to next page
delay (random number from 7 to 10) -- Delay to let on-screen navigation elements disappear
end repeat
A couple of set-up notes.
- Before you start this script you should activate Snapz-Pro X and set the capture region for a selection-capture. Also, go into Snapz-Pro X’s settings and set a save directory and a naming convention to number your saved images
- Set the repeat value on the first line to equal the number of pages in the document you are trying to capture.
- In its current very simple form, you will need to check-in on it since it doesn’t error-handle anything. Especially captchas. Just stop the script and re-start it.
After the script is done collecting you page images, combine them together in Preview and output as a PDF. Once you have a PDF, use OCR software to make it searchable.
I created this script using advice found using the Complete List of AppleScript Key Codes by eastmanreference and the solution proposed by @daveisgeek on How do I automate a key press in AppleScript?
