Communication without complication

Mac OS X includes a wonderful feature called PDF Services, which lets you create a PDF and send it to a folder or to some other process using a button in the File > Print dialog. It's available from almost every application that can print.

So we can create a PDF Service which takes the print output from an application and creates a ZIP file full of PNG images, one per page, ready for you to upload to CODA as an album, all with just a click or two. You can quickly create a slideshow on a CODA display from whichever application you prefer; Powerpoint, Keynote, Word, Aperture... the choice is yours.

Here's how to set it up.
This probably does require you to be running Leopard.

Creating the PDF service

A PDF Service can be as simple as an alias to a folder, or as complex as a full-blown application. For our purposes, we're going to use an Automator Workflow called 'Create ZIP file of PNGs'.

Here it is, zipped up (108KB).

Unzip it and put it in a folder called Library/PDF Services within your home directory. You'll need to create this folder if it doesn't already exist.

If you now fire up an application, you should find it as an option under the PDF button of the Print dialog. This is in Word, for example:

If you select this, the PDF of your document will be converted into a set of numbered images in a temporary directory, they will be zipped up into a file called Album.zip on your desktop, and the termporary images will be deleted, leaving you with Album.zip to upload to CODA. Very convenient.

Custom page sizes

You'll quickly discover that most programs will be expecting to print to a portrait piece of paper rather than a landscape screen, and the resolution may not be ideal either. I recommend that you create custom page size for your monitor resolutions and use those when printing.

To do this, you can choose 'File > Page setup' or select Paper Size from the Print dialog, depending on your application. This will let you get to your custom paper sizes. Here's what my dialog looks like:

Now, how did I come up with those numbers? Well, the PNGs in the zip file are created from the PDF using a resolution of 200 dpi (dots per inch). So if you want to have, say, 1280x1024 dots (pixels) for your screen, you need to create a page which is 1280/200 inches wide and 1024/200 inches tall. On my machine, the measurements are in centimetres, so I ended up with a page size of 16.26cm x 13.01cm.

If, before printing, I select those page sizes, I end up with images which are 1280x1024 pixels and look good on my screen. CODA will scale images if they aren't the right size, but this certainly helps.

Modifying the workflow

You can change the 'Create ZIP file of PNGs' workflow if you want to, to make it do other things. If you're creating one from scratch, you need to make sure you save it using the 'File > Save as Plugin...' menu option.

I hope this is useful and allows you to create interesting CODA content from a wide variety of applications!