Skip to content
MDDMDDMDD Does Docs
This document describes intent at the time it was written. It is part of the design record, not user documentation, and may not reflect the current behaviour of the code.

005 - pdf / pdf-pptx / pdf-docx commands

Purpose: Export Office files to PDF via AppleScript (macOS only).

Status: Implemented (2026-05-07)

Requirements

Section titled “Requirements”
  • mdd pdf-pptx [dir] finds PPTX files needing export, uses PowerPoint via AppleScript
  • mdd pdf-docx [dir] finds DOCX files needing export, uses Word via AppleScript
  • mdd pdf [dir] runs both
  • Staleness: only export if PDF missing or source is newer than PDF
  • Excludes symlinks and files in templates/ directory
  • Double-extension output: file.pptx.pdf, file.docx.pdf
  • Defaults to current directory if no [dir] argument

Design Approach

Section titled “Design Approach”
  • Commands in src/mdd/commands/pdf*.py; shared helpers in src/mdd/utils/pdf_export.py
  • AppleScript invoked via subprocess.run(['osascript', '-e', script])
  • macOS only — fails gracefully on other platforms (osascript not found)

Implementation Notes

Section titled “Implementation Notes”

Ported from quarto4sbp (cmd_pdf, cmd_pdf_pptx, cmd_pdf_docx). The cmd_*(args) entrypoint shape was superseded by S35’s register(subparsers, parents) convention; the three modules now expose register() and _run_* handlers in src/mdd/commands/pdf*.py.

Site built 2026-07-30.