The command

Everything this application can be asked to do, it can be asked from a terminal. The command is caseleaf, and it works on files without opening a window. It lives inside the application, at Contents/Helpers/caseleaf; link it once from somewhere on your path, such as /usr/local/bin, and it follows every update of the application from then on.

caseleaf marks report.pdf
caseleaf find report.pdf --for "indemnity"
caseleaf blackout report.pdf --page 4 --bounds 72,500,300,40

caseleaf on its own lists every command. caseleaf <command> --help says what one takes and what it does.

Why it exists

The window and the command are two ways of asking for the same things. A command is not a second implementation of a feature. It is the same operation the menu item calls, reached from somewhere else. So the two cannot drift: a change to what Black Out Permanently… does changes caseleaf redact at the same time.

The command matters when the work is not one document. A hundred contracts to check for a phrase, a folder of scans to recognise, a nightly job that marks whatever arrived that day: none of those should be done by hand, and none of them need a window.

What it can be asked

There are more commands than anyone holds in their head, so the table below is grouped rather than alphabetical. The groups are the application's own, the same ones caseleaf prints when you give it nothing to do.

Nothing in the first group can damage the document it is given, however wrong the arguments are. Most of them only read it. The three that produce anything (smaller, reveal, docx) write a new file where you say and leave the original alone. Everything in the second group either changes the document it is given or makes a new one beside it; each command's page says which, on the line describing the document itself. The third group matters only when a document is going to somebody who must not be able to recover what was taken out of it.

Each row gives the word and the single line the command prints beside it. The last column says whether the same command can also be asked for from AppleScript, which all of them can. Asking from AppleScript says how that is written.

The table leaves out what each command takes. The arguments differ from command to command, several commands accept more than one shape, and the command itself is the only place that cannot be out of date about them. So ask it: caseleaf <command> --help prints the syntax, every argument with a line about it, and whatever else you need to know before you run it.

Every command

These commands read a document and change nothing in it. Reach for them to ask a question of a file, or to write a copy that leaves the original alone.

These commands change the document they are given, or write a new one beside it. Each command's page says which.

These two matter only when a document is going to somebody who must not be able to recover what was taken out of it.

This one runs several operations as a single request.

Two things to know before you script it

A rectangle can be written either way. 367;584;2783;1036 is x, y, width and height in page points counted up from the bottom left, as PDF does. 2783x1036+367+584 is the X geometry convention, counted from the left and the top, and -x-y measures from the right and the bottom instead. Both are accepted everywhere a rectangle is asked for.

--page counts sheets, from 1, in the order they sit in the file. It is not the number printed on the page. The window's page field is the other way round: there you type the printed folio, and #12 to mean the twelfth sheet. So a rectangle worked out on screen and then handed to the command can land on a different sheet in any book whose numbering does not start at its first leaf.

Watch: a short video for this page is still to come.

Asking from AppleScript · Contents