Preview's "New From Clipboard" Function from Terminal?

Question

Preview's "New From Clipboard" Function from Terminal?

Is there a way to access Preview's "New From Clipboard" function from the command line? Or some other way to accomplish the same thing? I.e., open a new document containing the picture currently in the Clipboard?

Thanks in advance.

Posted on Feb 15, 2008 2:40 PM

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Answer 1

Bill Scott

Level 6

11,465 points

Feb 16, 2008 6:14 AM in response to Mark Jeffreys

If it is apple-scriptable we can write an osascript.

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Answer 2

Camelot

Level 9

58,599 points

Feb 16, 2008 10:49 AM in response to Mark Jeffreys

Preview is not directly scriptable at all, either via shell scripts or AppleScript.

However, AppleScript has some system-wide abilities such as sending keystrokes to applications, therefore you can effect the same actions via something like:

<pre class=command>osascript -e 'tell application "Preview" to activate' -e 'tell application "System Events" to keystroke "n" using {command down}'</pre>

This uses osascript to run the AppleScript commands that launches Preview and issues Cmd-N, the keyboard equivalent of 'New from Clipboard'.

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Answer 3

Feb 22, 2008 4:27 PM in response to Camelot

Thanks - I'll give that a try!

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