PDFopener

PDFopener
Downloads and display USPS Shipping Labels on Mac OS X.

The United States Postal Service offers a service to create and print shipping labels online. However, on the Mac, these labels aren't displayed correctly. This freeware AppleScript application fixes the problem. Labels are downloaded and opened automatically like they used to be. Tested under Mac OS X 10.4 and 10.5

Instructions

1. Click the download button below
2. Unzip the downloaded PDFopener.zip
3. Drag the PDFopener application into your Applications folder
4. Configure your web browser to use PDFopener for PDF files*
5. Go to your browser download folder and delete all old "LabelGenerationServlet" files
   
6. If this application makes your life easier, consider donating $1 below
   

What's wrong? The underlying cause is that USPS shipping labels are downloaded with a file extension of LabelGenerationServlet and converted to type Document which Preview doesn't recognize. This script when used as a downloader automatically renames the file and opens it.

* Browser Instructions

Firefox 3.*

1. Select Preferences from the Firefox menu
2. Select the Applications tab
3. Look for instances of "Portable Document Format" in the list
4. For each, from the pull down menu at the right select "Always Ask"
5. Print a sample label -- create a new label but instead of paying and printing, select print sample label
6. When prompted, choose the PDFopener application and check the "always open" box
7. If you have problems, contact me on via the link on this website.