Controlling a GUI application from a script
 

Hi

I have the following problem. I have a linux binary for a GUI app. I don't have the source code for it and the author also refuses to make the source code available. The GUI app works like this

1) Open Image File
2) Click on a button to do some image processing
3) Save file

The problem is that I need to do this for > 1000 images... and the app can not be used from the command line. I know the GUI is based on QT. Is there a way to control a GUI applications from a script or other software? Where is a good place to start looking for a solution to this problem?

Regards,
Helge

Sounds like you need something like "expect" for a GUI.

In the Wikipedia page for Expect I see this quote:

I haven't used any of those but a quick perusal of the page for Autohotkey makes it sound like what you need and says it has a Linux version:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autohotkey

There are links to the other two in the original article for Expect.

BeOS used to have one that works but not sure you can port it. I think it was called hey.

Thanks. Ended up using xmacro.

I am not sure what kind of processing did you need, but next time using imagemagick or even the gimp command line interface could save you all the pain.

Thanks i92guboj

I'll keep that in mind. However, the kind of processing I needed was not available in those packages.

Out of curiosity, what was that?

I need to perform tracking of facial features in a movie using Active Appearence Models. The binary tools works fine for training the models, but fails for a movie due to the one-image-at-a-time limitation of the GUI.

The tool is available here http://www.isbe.man.ac.uk/~bim/softw...doc/index.html.