Automatic launch of Automator- or Applescripts on 2 macs using Dropbox

macOS
1

Hi Automators,

After listening to the first three shows, I started my first project. I would like to help my mum, who is getting blind. The ideas is to get text to speech with scanned documents.

Getting the document OCR is fairly well described on the internet (with Dropbox, Hazel, PDFpenPro, Automator…). As my mum speaks French and German, my challenge was to begin to use AppleScript to be able to distingush if a text file is French or German.

Here an information to the community, it took me many days to understand that reading a text-file on a dropbox folder caused issues (open for access, close of the file did not work correctly). As soon as I begun to let the mac/Applescript do the manipulation of the text-file outside of Dropbox the Applescript worked fine.

My final point now, is following due to some tasks at the location of my mum, some tasks on my homeserver.

The process should ideally work that way:

  1. My mum scans the document at her location.
  2. The scanned file is automatically saved in Drobox.
  3. At my place the server is picking up the file.
  4. OCR is performed and put in another Dropbox folder
    My Problem
  5. At my mums place Automator extracts the text out of PDF
  6. The Applescript determines language of text file (at the moment the file is moved in a French or German Folder)
  7. Automator selects file and speaks it out (maybe this point can be integated in point 6)

Now my question: Is there a way to launch step 5 automatically, without buying a second Hazel licence. As Folder Actions are not allowed on Dropbox Folders.

Any help would be appreciated.

2

Could you do the text extraction on your server?

In terms of triggering things remotely, you could technically SSH into you mother’s computer ad trigger a command … but there’s a heap of things around that in terms of opening firewall ports, potentially considering a VPN connection or really locking down the SSH connection. If that sounds like too much effort, and I think most of the time for most people it probably is, then an additional Hazel license might be the best option for you to consider as it gives you a lot of easily maintained options.

However, just so you have another automatable option that might be viable… you could instead have a script that is set to run say every minute, that actions anything in the Dropbox folder. That could operate directly to trigger an AppleScript (e.g. via the osascript command), or copy a file to a folder where you do have a folder action set-up.

Whatever option you figure you can set-up, maintain and work (including any options in other responses) wll inevitably be the best one for you to use.

Hope that helps.

3

Thank you very much!

4
  1. At my mums place Automator extracts the text out of PDF
    Is there a way to launch step 5 automatically, without buying a second Hazel licence. As Folder Actions are not allowed on Dropbox Folders.

I may be well out of my element here so take this with a grain of salt. :slight_smile:

I wonder if it’s possible to get around the folder action limitation somehow with a symlink?

5

Hi

I‘ve heard of syslinks but not used them so far. Rosmary O. mentionned howevert that using them with sync services could be dangerous, so use it with caution. Admitting that I am a beginner in automation, I will simply use a second Hazel.
Have a nice day !

Stéphane

1 Like
6

Agreed, would definitely want to tinker a test a bit before trusting the mechanism to anything important.