> But vbscript is not 'the' scripting language of windows 
> applications, it just happens to be the inside engine of most 
> Microsoft apps. It won't do you much good to automate a task 
> using let's say Firefox.

Vbscript can be run from the command line and has a function that will send
keystrokes to other applications. So you can use it to automate Firefox or
any other application that can respond to keystrokes. I don't believe there
is a way to simulate mouse clicks, but I could be wrong.

> One problem I had is that I create invoices from an 
> administration program (I wrote that myself, in Python), and 
> I want to print them in a nice format. I used to have a 
> letterhead in Word, print that on a stack of paper, the 
> invoice itself was in html, and I used IE to print that (I 
> could not get Firefox to print by default without any headers 
> or footers). I had to do that by hand: open the file, print 
> print print (I need 3 copies), open next file, etc. I 
> switched to generating rtf, so I can have the letterhead and 
> invoice proper in one file, but I would still have to open 
> Word, print print print, open next file etc. I could not find 
> a Word command line option to cause it to open the file, 
> print it, and quit. I recently learned that this can easily 
> be done by specifying a macro to run. That macro still can't 
> print 3 times (I dunno why, it simply does not work), but I 
> can start Word with the macro 3 times, no problem.
> 
> The point of this is that Word is a typical GUI program, and 
> with its macro/scription facility it is not too closed. But 
> to do something basic (print a file) in an automated way 
> (what else are computers for!) I must first get the idea that 
> this can (only) be done by a startup macro, and I have to 
> learn the language for that macro. (OK, google helps a lot for
> both) A decent CLI application would provide a documented way 
> to do this from the command line...

Yeah, I hear you. But this is also a result of the monolithic application
issue. This is the Windows way. On the other hand, if there were one little
app that just prints things, another that just overlays forms and graphics,
and they had a nice little scripting language to bind them together... That
is the Unix way, and I can appreciate the point of it, but the user
interface is hard to be friends with.

> > the standard Win32 command line stuff like SORT, DIR, etc...
> > Should have GUI
> > interfaces accessible from the command line as menu pull downs or 
> > popups.
> 
> I realy don't see any use for that

Learning how to use them without having to read the documentation and type
in correct command line parameters. 


---
James.
 

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