First of all, I consider this a poor example of a hint because it manipulates file extensions to tease applications into doing what I wanted. However, it fulfilled a problem I had, so perhaps it will help you in a similar situation.
A not-for-profit recently replaced their one donated Windows machine for a new low-end eMac. The user loved using Microsoft Publisher on the PC to produce a two-page newsletter, and couldn't stop bragging about its features. Being in publishing for 15 years, including dealing with advertising material created in Publisher, I had my own thoughts on Publisher, but kept them to myself -- an application like inDesign is too feature rich and out of the budget.
When Pages came out, I was excited that this may break the Publisher habit. So far, so good, except they wanted the stock clip art that comes with Publisher. After converting the thousands of WMFs to PDFs (to retain scalability) and importing the JPEGs into iPhoto, there was no way to allow the Pages user to browse PDFs like they can with images imported into iPhoto. Even though the Finder is a nice image browser, that option would never be accepted, they needed an integrated solution.
After looking at the useless Movies pop-up menu for a while, I renamed a PDF so it ended with .mov instead of .pdf, went back to Pages, and there it was -- the PDF, complete with thumbnail. I feared the worst in that it would not scale or print correctly, but as far as I can tell, it worked just as PDFs would.
To rename the remaining thousands of PDFs, I used FileNamer, but any batch renamer will do.
A not-for-profit recently replaced their one donated Windows machine for a new low-end eMac. The user loved using Microsoft Publisher on the PC to produce a two-page newsletter, and couldn't stop bragging about its features. Being in publishing for 15 years, including dealing with advertising material created in Publisher, I had my own thoughts on Publisher, but kept them to myself -- an application like inDesign is too feature rich and out of the budget.
When Pages came out, I was excited that this may break the Publisher habit. So far, so good, except they wanted the stock clip art that comes with Publisher. After converting the thousands of WMFs to PDFs (to retain scalability) and importing the JPEGs into iPhoto, there was no way to allow the Pages user to browse PDFs like they can with images imported into iPhoto. Even though the Finder is a nice image browser, that option would never be accepted, they needed an integrated solution.
After looking at the useless Movies pop-up menu for a while, I renamed a PDF so it ended with .mov instead of .pdf, went back to Pages, and there it was -- the PDF, complete with thumbnail. I feared the worst in that it would not scale or print correctly, but as far as I can tell, it worked just as PDFs would.
To rename the remaining thousands of PDFs, I used FileNamer, but any batch renamer will do.
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