opening illustrator EPS files using Applescript

[Stephen Rabbitt]

I have recently been getting to grips with using Applescript to take control of Photoshop 7 and things are going well. However I now want to explore similar possibilities with illustrator 10, can you help?
I do not know the comand to open illustrator EPS files, can anyone help?
I have tried to use a similar comand which I use to open Photoshop EPS files in Photoshop;

'open file "blah" as Photoshop EPS

but obviously changing the application type, but this did not work.

[Mary Evans]

But let me ask you what you think of this: I illustrate textbooks... I have close to a thousand grayscale vectors that are very nice.. Unfortunately I didn't consider a year ago that we would want to make instructional CDs also. And now I'm looking to make this stuff color.. In a Hurry (I have about a month and a half along with a massive work load of other stuff). Any how, I'm wondering if I'm barking up a very tall tree in the hopes that I could format a script to take my grayscale gradients and assign colors to them. I'm pretty sure that my gradients are limited to a variation of less than 20 Black Percentages... And it would be huge if I could at least make them a percentage of one color. Any advice?
In addition, I am willing to figure a way to do this in Photoshop, as my final output will be jpeg... Thanks for reading my many words -Mary

[Mary Evans]

bought "Adobe Illustrator Scripting w/ V. Basic and Applescript" (by Ethan Wilde). If you go to www.peachpit.com/illustratorscripting, you can download 15 or so Illustrator Scripts. Hope this helps... I'm just starting with the whole Applescript thing so I can't do much for ya at the moment.

[Stephen Rabbitt]

It sounds like the right thing to do, if you can automate the process it is probably only likely to take a day depending on the type of Mac you use.
We have created our own digital asset management database using Filemaker and we script Photoshop to reformat thousands of images to different formats and varying sizes, it works brilliantly! And saves a hell of a lot of time!

Thanks for the Illustrator stuff.

Steve.

[Ann Shelbourne]

Mary:

Try this: Open your grayscale images in Photoshop; change mode to RGB; and make a Hue/Saturation Adjustment layer.
Use the Hue/Sat palette with "Colorize" checked.

Adjust the sliders for color and saturation and use an adjustment curve to control contrast.

Make an Action and a Droplet if you want to automate the process.