Program for Mouse/Click Movement

[KuJaX]

One of the tasks a fellow employee at work has to do is circle of a bunch of signature lines in a PDF document. The PDF document areas to circle are always the same and so there should be some program to automate this.

Basically the PDF is 20 pages and on about 10 of the pages there are areas for the customer to sign. They are different spots on these 10 pages (but consistent between customers). The task is basically going though with Adobe and using the red circle tool and drawing a circle around where the customer should sign on these 10 pages, then saves the PDF for the sales person to give to the customer.

I'm thinking that as long as the 20 pages are the same for customer A as they are for customer B (atleast on where to sign) and you setup Adobe Acrobat (or any particular reader/writer) for like 100% view and full screen that there should be a program out there that you can program to essentially macro this task out by doing it once and then it saves the mouse and click movements as well as keyboard strokes (page down).

Any ideas of such a program? Or any other method that you may find more efficient? Is AutoHotKey the best solution for something like this?

All I know is that spending 5 minutes going through 20 pages to circle 10 different spots many times a day is a waste of this guy's time.

 

[The Donut]

This may sound silly, but if the PDF document areas are always the same why not modify the PDF to have the circles in the first place and just print the PDF when needed?

 

[KuJaX]

This may sound silly, but if the PDF document areas are always the same why not modify the PDF to have the circles in the first place and just print the PDF when needed?

PDFs get generated from an application, so it isn't possible to adjust them prior to getting produced from the application (application is not open source).

 

[MindBuster]

I would guess ImageMagick could get the job done, if as you say the places to be circled are always at the same spot, then it should be possible, open the pdf, place the circles, and save again, automatically through a batch file or AutoIt or AutoHotKey.

Can you post a sample pdf, with and without the circles, or is it business secrets?

/edit

doesnt photoshop have a Batch/Script function, where you can record everything you do and then just replay it. ?
I dont use photoshop myself, I use PaintShopPro, ancient version, but it has scripting where you just click "start recording" and click stop when done, save the script and then replay it over and over with a single click.

 

[KuJaX]

I would guess ImageMagick could get the job done, if as you say the places to be circled are always at the same spot, then it should be possible, open the pdf, place the circles, and save again, automatically through a batch file or AutoIt or AutoHotKey.

Can you post a sample pdf, with and without the circles, or is it business secrets?

/edit

doesnt photoshop have a Batch/Script function, where you can record everything you do and then just replay it. ?
I dont use photoshop myself, I use PaintShopPro, ancient version, but it has scripting where you just click "start recording" and click stop when done, save the script and then replay it over and over with a single click.

Interesting. When researching AutoHotKey option I came upon like a MacroMagic type program that may do the trick. I'll have to play around with it.

I would provide a sample PDF, but yes, sort of secretive stuff.