I'm sure this will be an easy one for some of you. I want to have a script that takes a PDF of a cover file (usually very wide since it's printed along the front, spine, and back of the book), crops out the crop marks (I have a little code snippet that I found that can do this), prompts for the width of the front cover size (i.e. 6 inches for a 6" x 9" book), and then sets the crop box from the far right edge to the width that was input. I'm trying to put together a little tool for my company's Art Department to save them time creating jpegs of our books covers (there are a lot of them). Their current process is to place the PDF in Indesign on a 6x9 page and export a JPG from there, seems time consuming.
As an example, a cover file for one of our books, without the trim marks, is 12.625" by 9". The script would prompt a user for the width of the cover, they would input 6" and it would, ideally, set the crop box to be 6" wide and 9" high (not touching the height, since that is already correct), and then save that cropped PDF as a JPG (and not save the cropped PDF so as to leave it untouched after the process is done), preferably with an option to select the output location and even batch run it on a bunch of PDF cover files.
I'm sure this is possible, does anyone think it will be particularly easy? I don't have a lot of experience but I'm not necessarily looking for a handout since I'm not really bringing a whole lot to the table (but will take one!). Any help or pointers appreciated, or maybe someone who already has something like this could provide some help or resources to get started, even If I have to piece it together from a series of helpful URLs.
Thanks in advance for any helpful responses I'm anticipating!
Nick