[Virtualacorn-list] RiscOS-MS file conversion

[Jeremy Nicoll - ml VA]

On 2017-05-22 18:55, Bob Ardler wrote:
>                                                                       
> On this (home) HardDisc4 there are >30k maths sheets I've composed on
> RiscOS for my school, mostly as Drawfiles or on TechWriter. Boss now
> wants them on the school network -- which accommodates only Microsoft
> and Apple machines. The only way I've transferred Drawfiles previously
> is to shrink them by 80%, if landscape rotate through -pi/2, drag into
> TechWriter, save as a Word file and email to school as an attachment.
> 
> Are there better ways? The prospect of the above plod repeated 30k
> times is daunting. Is there an MS (or Apple) app closer to Draw
> (or ProCAD)?

If you just want the picture of the page, then printing each document as
a PDF is probably fairly simple.  Use eg Steve Fryatt's !PrintPDF (which
adds a virtual PDf printer to RO).

Automating the whole process so you don't have to point and click 
through
each sequence 30,000 times could be done with (I think), on RISC OS the
!Keystroke application - see

   http://quantumsoft.riscository.com/#keystroke

I've never used it, though I have used similar products (eg on early 
versions
of Windows to automate what was going on in a window running an IBM 
mainframe
terminal application).  For 30,000 processes, I would think learning to 
use
!Keystoke, assuming it still works, is worth a few hours' endeavour.


There are of course various equivalents to !Keystroke that run under 
Windows,
but I would assume that they just see every RO window as part of the 
whole
bitmap that represents the RO screen in its VRPC window... and that 
might be
harder or impossible to automate.


-- 
Jeremy Nicoll - my opinions are my own