How to use Automator to upload my real estate listing to web?

Question

I want to use Automator to extract any text in a set region of a PDF, extract all images from the PDF, place all the text in corresponding fields of an Excel spreadsheet, and then upload that spreadsheet to my website.

Answer 1

Automator can extract the text from a PDF, although the action included with OS X acts on a PDF file, not the selected region thereof. Automator likewise has an action to turn entire PDF pages into images. Automator can also call scripts or programs. Because of the extensibility of Automator, I am sure a skillful programmer could be hired to write a program (perhaps using Automator) that would do what you propose, it falls beyond the capabilities of the stock automator components.

Automator could create the text and image files you want, then call custom-written scripts or programs to scrape those files and put the information from those files into the spreadsheet you describe, and call another script to upload the spreadsheet to your website.

The specifics of how to write such a script customized to your particular formatting and uploading needs is a question localized to your unique situation, and far too localized for this site, but the answer to the more general question is:

it's probably possible for Automator to call programs that do this, but there's no easy way to do it with built-in Automator components