Help needed: Shell script stopped working in Mountain Lion!

[Bruce Pokras]

Hello all!

I develop an application called Patent Grabber that downloads patents from various US and international patent authorities. Unlike many other authorities that provide patent pages in PDF, the US Patent & Trademark Office (USPTO) provides patent pages in TIFF. From Tiger through Lion, the following script (which I believe came from a member of this group) has worked to convert those TIFF images into PDF pages:

put "/System/Library/Printers/Libraries/convert" into tConvertApp
get shell(tConvertApp && "-f" && quote & tiffFile & quote && "-o" && quote & pdfFile & quote && "-j application/pdf 2>&1")

Now under Mountain Lion this script has stopped working. Users of my application who have upgraded to Mountain Lion are left with a folder full of TIFFs and an error message from my application that it could not find any PDFs to combine into the final single PDF patent file. Does anyone have an idea what could be happening?

Since foreign patent authorities provide patent pages in PDF, I know that the other shell script that Patent Grabber uses (which combines multiple PDF pages into a single PDF file) works fine. I think that should rule out this being a Mountain Lion security issue as a result of my application being unsigned, right??? Everything is going on in the Documents folder.

Any insights would be greatly appreciated. My 2006 iMac cannot run Mountain Lion, so I cannot simply do the upgrade to see what is going on.

Regards,

Bruce Pokras
Blazing Dawn Software
www.blazingdawn.com