[ashtoash]

I print a document nearly postcard size for presspacks that contains graphic layers, and different text (antialised, and aliased) in different colors. THe text and two images are always varible. The document cannot be vector and is 1440 resolution (100mb) and the 6 per page version is 300mb) Right now they are layered PSD files and complicated to edit. I'd like to create an application front in that will "fill in the blanks" I really need to keep it in either .PSD or PDF format. The application would either generator or interact directly with the file. I could probably script the text editing in adobe but I'd like to keep it in an easy to generate file.

Also I'm thinking of requiring a barcode so it might need to use some kinda barcode library.

Is there any example cocoa or rb or any modules, libraries or anywhere to get started with the PSD or PDF interactions?

[Detrius]

You know more about what you want than I do, so keep that in mind. That said, the graphics in OS X are done in Display Postscript, so exporting to PDF is as simple as printing. Depending on what you are trying to do, it may be easier for you to create your document by hand programmatically--as compared to figuring out how to properly edit your file without corrupting it.

[Angus_D]

Originally posted by Detrius:
That said, the graphics in OS X are done in Display Postscript

No, they aren't. They're actually PDF-based.

Manipulating PSD or PDF documents is quite hard (I don't know if Adobe makes the PSD file format available publicly for obvious reasons, and PDF is far more of a rendering format that you can't really make many changes to). I don't know if you'd be able to use AppleScript with Photoshop or something to do what you want.

You could hack up some Python scripts using the Quartz bindings to composite the stuff, see /Developer/Examples/Quartz/Python. Also, take a look at the stuff that's coming in Tiger (Automator, Quartz Composer, etc).

[larkost]

What you are describing sounds to me like a great application for FileMaker Pro. You don't describe much of the process that goes on around it, or what sort of bar code you are looking for, but I would guess that creating the FMP solution would take a few hours at most. FileMaker can easily be setup to create PDF's at any size

Someone with FileMaker Developer (such as myself) could even create a runtime for you that would not even require you to buy FileMaker. If you would be interested in me doing this work for you, just send me a private message with your contact information, and we can talk.