AppleScript: The Definitive Guide

Internally Scriptable Application

A number of applications are internally scriptable. By this I mean that the application contains its own internal mechanism, possibly a proprietary language, for automating just that application. When such an application is developed for Mac OS, it sometimes happens that its developers would like to provide it with a means of communicating with other applications. That means Apple events, and AppleScript is a convenient way to send Apple events (convenient both for the developers and for the end user), so a typical approach is to let the internal scripting language treat text as AppleScript code. Such applications are not very good places to develop your AppleScript code, since you usually have no way to edit and test that code coherently inside the application. A typical approach is to develop the code in a dedicated script editing environment such as the Script Editor, and then copy it into the other application.

An example is Microsoft Word. Word comes with its own internal scripting language, Visual Basic for Applications (VBA), whose purpose is to automate Word itself. The Mac OS version of VBA also includes the MacScript function, which accepts a string and compiles and runs it as AppleScript on the fly. For more about using VBA in Word, see Steven Roman’s Writing Word Macros (O’Reilly).

Constructing your AppleScript code in VBA is rather a trying experience, because you have to pass through VBA’s rules about generating strings. Since ...