Here’s something I used to do in a manual fashion but was happy to finally think of using the automated feature found in Tiger. I’m sure I picked up on this nugget of information via Macworld or somewhere along those lines, but I felt it was worthwhile mentioning again. Tiger makes it easy to automate the process of saving your web receipts.
I decided that my CSS/XHTML skills were in need of some brushing up. They’re definitely getting a bit rusty, seeing how I haven’t really needed them in well over a year. Not to mention, my little IE Windows issues only prove that I needed to seek a higher source.
So while in Barnes & Noble today, I picked up Dan’s latest book, Bulletproof Web Design, but decided against paying the $40 retail price and put it back. (I had an email coupon sitting in my inbox at home.)
I then went home and bought the book online along with Dave Shea’s book, The Zen of CSS Design for about half the price. Both of these books looked liked they were just the thing I was looking for: techniques that continue to be creative and innovative while being bulletproof to the various browser quirks.
So after I bought my books, I was taken to the confirmation page. Now some people might print this page out and some might save the web page by either saving it as a web archive or by printing it as a PDF. Well, if you’re running Tiger, just click and hold the PDF button found in the Print dialog and then select “Save PDF to Web Receipts Folder”. Your browser will print the PDF and Tiger will run an automated workflow that creates the folder in your Home directory and adds the receipt within it. Consider using this for all your online purchases and be sure to check out the other options located in the PDF button menu, such as Compress PDF and Mail PDF. See, we’re one step closer to that promised paperless office.
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I’ve been dumping PDF receipts in my documents folder since OS X came out, but this has become easily retrievable thanks to Spotlight.
warning — after doing this with a simple folder alias in PDF Services folder for years, then switching to the Automator action built into Tiger, “Save PDF to Web Reciepts Folder”, i just discovered that the latter has a bug which overwrites files; so for example if you save credt card payment receipts and the like, the bug will cause the receipt for the current month to overwrite the previous month because it has the same name! this was an unpleasant surprise after so many years of it working reliably; i suggest you replace the default action with an alias to your “web receipts” folder
I had the problem of overwriting the files myself. I lost 6 months of statements, credit card payments and transactions because I did not realize the files were being written over.
I have fixed this issue by adding two lines to the automator script that saves the files to the web receipts folder. Now, my action will append the date and time to each pdf file created in web receipts. This is what I would have expected in the first place.
The script is called “Save PDF to Web Receipts Folder.workflow” in the /Library/PDF Services folder. You may use my modified script: http://www.braninjohnson.com/download/Save PDF to Web Receipts Folder.workflow.zip Just unzip and place in your /Library/PDF Services folder.
What did he do? You can edit the system /Library/PDF Services/ web receipts workflow, or you can copy it into your own PDF Services folder.
1) Edit the web receipts workflow in Automator
2) Search for (in Automator) “Rename”
3) Add Rename Finder. . . above the step 1, “Folder” in the workflow
4) Don’t Add the extra stuff
5) Save (The defaults are good)
The date is appended to each file so there are no longer any overwritten files (unless you make 2 purchases in the same day). Best would be to find a way to insert a hash of the web page into the filename. Selecting “Make Sequential” (step 4.5) in place of “Date and Time” makes sense, too.