---**---auto-numbering objects---**---

[frank neukermans]

I work for a venue in Brussels. The seat map contains 8000 objects which stand for every individual chair. It is a heavy file and it takes ages to give every single seat a unique number.

Can this be done automatically.

HELP!!!

[Gary Newman]

Wow. Good question, and I wish I had an answer. If anybody has a solution, I’d like to know, too.

[Philippe JACQUES]

Could be solved by a plug-in or an action. I'm just 30 km from you so just e-mail me with some additional info if you interested to go in this way.

Good luck

Philippe JACQUES
Author of the MagiSign plug-in
<http://www.magisign.com>

[Adam Schneider]

How could one make an action do something like this?

[Philippe JACQUES]

Depends of the how the seats are arranged.

I suppose a plug-in would do it easier. But I imagine it could be done by producing a list of number outside (i.e. through Microsoft Excel) and by copy/cut/move any of the number at the dedicated position through some AppleScript.

Note the time to produce it and to fix any problem could be not competitive. At the opposite, I've some useful algorithms to copy/place some items in my current MagiSign I could adapt to a project like this one. But we have to check all the content of this, as Adobe Illustrator is i.e. limited in terms of maximum items !

[Teri Pettit]

It could be done even without an external file with a script, but a script is not an Action.

[Adam Schneider]

You mean AppleScript, Teri?

[James E. Talmage]

> How could one make an action do something like this?

I'd like to know, too.

It seems you should be able to do it like this:

1) Draw the original seat. Group it. Drag it to the Symbols Palette.
2) Drag an Instance of the Symbol onto the page. Leave it selected.
2) Action Palette: New Action. Name it NumberSeat. Click Record.
3) Double-click the Pointer. Angle: 0°, Distance: .25" (or whatever).
Click Copy.
4) Action Palette Menu: Stop Recording.
5) Action Palette Menu: Insert Menu Item. Select Menu: Save Selection.
Click OK.
6) Action Palette Menu: Turn on Button Mode.
7) Click the NumberSeat button with the mouse. Press Enter with your
left hand. Each time you do this, AI clones the seat, moves it and names
it with the next higher number. All the iterations are now listed in the
Select menu (thus, selectable by number).

I don't know how far you could practically go with this. 8000 is alot of
seats. So it probably isn't really practical for Frank's problem, unless
he can figure a routine for dealing with rows of seats at a time or
something.

But here's my point:

After doing the above, when you use the Select menu to select, say,
Selection 6; all the iterations UP TO selection 6 get selected. I don't
understand why. That is, each time I invoked Select>Save Selection, only
one object was selected. AI automatically increments the numbers. But it
seems to internally "include" the pre-existing selection name along with
the new selection; thus, when you use the Select menu to select
"Selection 6", you actually select Selections 1-6. Which seems pretty
useless to me. Is this a bug?

It gets worse: If you:

1) use Select>Edit Selection to remove the names of previous selections
2) start the process over again.
3) Select Selection 1 from the Select Menu.

...ALL the objects you had previously named up to this point get
selected. That is, it seems that Edit Selection>Remove does not really
remove the selection names from the objects. What gives?

Obviously, naming a selection is different from naming an object by
entering a name in the Note field of the Attributes palette. But I don't
see any way to tell an Action to automatically increment a number
entered in the Note field. It seems it would be nice if AI had a Name
Object command much like its Save Selection command which would
automatically number objects incrementally by default, as does Save
Selection. That way, it would be useable for inclusions in Actions by
way of Insert Menu Item.

This kind of stuff is why I've always said I'd like to see Actions given
functionality much like that in defining fields in FileMaker. I don't
want to mess with scripting. But being able to insert calculations
(scale the height of this ellipse by the sine of its width) and select a
few pre-built functions from a menu (AutoSerialize) just like defining
fields in a database program would open a world of possibility for
Actions without requiring resorting to scripting.

JET

[Philippe JACQUES]

This kind of stuff is why I've always said I'd like to see Actions given
functionality much like that in defining fields in FileMaker.

I agree. This is way my preferences currently go to plug-in for this kind of stuffs. There are so many features still to implement in a software like Adobe Illustrator ! We are only at version 10 ! Hope to see many other update in the next decade and later !

Do you remind the list of features Terri listed few month ago here about the Transform palette ?

Nice week-end everyone

Philippe JACQUES

[Teri Pettit]

Re: "Obviously, naming a selection is different from naming an object by entering a name in the Note field of the Attributes palette. But I don't see any way to tell an Action to automatically increment a number entered in the Note field."

JET,

Since he is working on what is described as a "seat map", I took Frank's desire to "give every single seat a unique number" to mean that each seat picture contains in the middle a little text object (probably a point text object) visually labelling each seat with its number.

An AppleScript or Visual Basic script could do this, by generating the seat map containing empty text objects, and then programmatically iterating through all the text objects in the file, assigning each one a number.

Frank,

We haven't heard back from you since the thread started. Maybe you could clarify what you mean by giving a seat a number?