Learning About Scripts in PSP 8
This is a tutorial on how to write and run scripts. Any similarity between this and any other script is purely coincidental. What I have learned, I've learned on my own, by trial and error and by reading the Help Menu in PSP 8. This tutorial will be written in several parts. The first part will be fairly simple on how to do it. The next part will be on how to use it and the third part will go into several of the different features of Scripting.
Part 1 - Writing your first script
What is a Script? It's brand new to PSP 8 and now that I know how to use it, I think it's the neatest thing since sliced bread! For those of you who design tags, let me tell you, it will save you lots and lots of time when you're making them for your Always List!
A Script is nothing more than a mini-program that PSP 8 writes for you. Whenever you have repetitious steps to go through, you simply tell PSP 8 that you want it to start recording the steps. After you've saved the script, you can rerun it over and over again while you simply sit back and watch it run!
So, are you ready to write your first script?
There are a few things you need to know, first. Take a look at the picture below. You will see, that when PSP 8 installed on your computer, it installed a file folder under My Documents.This file is called My PSP 8 Files....and in and of itself, is a really cool new feature in PSP 8.( Let's see a showing of hands here...how many of you knew this file existed? And if you did, how many knew what it was for? Don't feel bad...I almost deleted it when I first saw it!) Whenever you download something, it automatically is downloaded into; this folder instead of directly into your PSP 8 program. This is great because we all know, the more stuff we jam into our PSP program, the slower it works! AND...PSP 8 is set up to search this file when it's looking for things. Let's take a few minutes to look at this because it's important to know about these folders when it comes to writing scripts.
If you open that file, you will see this inside:
Again, aside from the Plugins folder (and I don't know why that doesn't exist here), you have all the stuff you would see in your program files. The files that we will be looking at will be the Scripts-Restricted and the Scripts-Trusted folders.
In order to make sure your PSP 8 program is pointed towards this file, you must go into your program and set your preferences. I'm not an expert at this so please, if you need more help with it, look in your HELP menu in PSP 8. But this is how I do it:
1) Go to File/Preferences/File Location:
2) This will open up a File Locations box like the one below:
3) Scroll down to Scripts-Restricted and Scripts-Trusted on the left hand side. You can add the path to your My Documents/My PSP8 Files/Scrips-Restricted, as well as Scripts-Trusted. You can see where my program has that path already. It's the first one on top. But, if you do not have that path in your program already, click on Add, then Browse to the My Documents/My PSP8 Files/ Scripts-Restricted folder. Do the same for the Scripts-Trusted folder. Now, when you go to look for a script, the program will look within itself (see the second line there?) AND it will look also within the My Documents folder.
Once you are certain that PSP 8 is pathed towards those files, we're ready to write a script. The scripts we write will go into these files, and not into the program itself.
Please go to Part 2- "Writing a Script" for the next lesson.