Automator to the rescue

This past week, I finally upgraded my wife’s MacBook to Snow Leopard (yes, I realize it is a year late). The upgrade went fine, but last night my wife told me that her DYMO Labelwriter 4XL wasn’t properly printing PayPal shipping labels. I wrote a few months ago about printing labels on the DYMO. I’m not sure what happened to my wife’s machine, but I had to solve this problem. I went down the path of scripting it and sending the label to DYMO’s software. Unfortuantely DYMO’s software is junk and threw exceptions when I used their demo AppleScripts. So, I had to find an alternative.

After a ton of work, I managed to hack together an Automator workflow that used Pixelmator, Preview, and some GUI scripting. It isn’t really pretty, but amazingly it works.

While my script works, I can’t guarantee it will work for everyone, but here it is in case anyone wants to use it as a basis for their own. Download the script