David,
I’m glad it worked for you.
I had a similar need to make PDFs from text edit documents and my first approach was very similar to yours but I had spotty results using mouseclicks at designated screen positions so I went with the applescript approach I describe here TextEdit macros to Toggle Zoom Font, Open PDF in Preview It serves up a preview rather than a saved document but that is easily changed of course.
It doesn’t give you a KM movie of the steps however…