[3d Text In Illustrator Cs4 Serial Code
Sharif Garmon
So I have a bunch(about 300+) generated coupon codes I want to see if I can add to a specific illustrator file. Is there any simple way to achieve this without having to individually paste each unique code into illustrator manually or can I use a tool to pull the codes from the excel sheet?
I'm making redemption cards that have unique codes per each card and it has to be a finished illustrator file when it's done because the cards will be cut and engraved using a Laser. Which means it only reads vector files in RGB.
Anyone have code/script for this or know how to create code to extract all the text off an active document in Illustrator. Extract text as in text for any & all text items in the document (TextFrameItem, TextRange, TextPath, etc.). We can just dump the text with alerts().
What I'm not sure of is what order or hierarchy to extract the text. Where do we start from activeDocument.textFrameItems/TextRanges/etc. How are text organized in Illustrator? I'm new to Illustrator scripting.
All the official Guides and References are vague, they have the bare minimum to get anyone started, they could be better, fortunately we have this forum and other pioneers (fellow users) who paved the road for the rest of us.
PageItem is what's called a Super Class, while the objects themselves are Classes. Classes inherit all properties from their parent Super Class, then add properties or methods particular to each individual Class.
Super Classes and Inheritance are very important Javascript concepts (not explained in the guides). One of their major advantages of using them is to avoid creating the same properties and methods for a number of similar objects.
For example (building the js API), if TextFrames, PathItems, PlacedItems, etc, all have Name, GeometricBounds, and Typename properties, instead of creating 3 objects, each with the same 3 properties (9 properties total), it is more convenient to create a super class PageItem, add these 3 properties, then create our 3 classes based on it that will share the same properties....then, continue adding properties particular to each class, like TextFrame.contents, PathItem.area, or PlacedItem.file
I'm working on a mapmaking project and I need to number element from approximately 1 to 100 on every map that i'm creating. I would like to automate the process and I'm losing a lot of time typing each number in a new text box for each element. Do you know if there is an easier way to do it or to create directly 100 text box from 1 to 100 ?
I tried to use the "script" option but Illustrator does not take in account when I type a new number, he just create 100 text box
ah crap. i noticed that typo too, but i guess i fixed it in the wrong version. (i typed it out in sublime, but then copied it to VS code to test it. looks like i fixed the bug in VS and then copied the function from sublime..)
It would be rad if Illustrator had a user-friendly scripting gui like Cinema4D has in the form of xpresso. Xpresso is rad. You can literally drop references to objects into the xpresso window, then find and link the attributes. For instance, if I were doing this same type of thing in Cinema4D I would simply drop the artboard and the text field into xpresso, create an outgoing port in the artboard for artboard name, and then drag and drop that onto an incoming port on the text field for text entry. Illustrator could be this cool. Suppose I could feature request it, but what are the chances...
The scripting guides for Adobe Illustrator ( ) as well as other Adobe application's scripting guides are very clear on explaining properties and methods we can use with JavaSscript, Apple Script and VB Script.
This is pretty wonky, but here's the garble I have so far. I've read through the Scripting Guide, and opened the Scripting Reference, but it's probably clear I really have no idea what I'm doing. Any more tips?
Here's some VB.NET code to help you if you can convert it to JS -- well it's either going to help you or confuse the heck out of you. I hope it's the former. This code dosen't do everything that you want, like place the artboard name at the bottom with an additional blank line (or that's what I understood) but it names each artboard. I had really hoped to complete it more for you but ran out of time. Like I said -- I hope that it helps.
thanks Larry. A friend of mine helped me get it working. Still trying to control position and a few other things, plus add the feature to make the text fields update automatically when an artboard name is changed, but hey the basic part is working!
Nice touch Carlos. I didn't know that. Thanks -- good to know. Actually I guess I never thought about it. If really necessary, in .NET, I would probably periodically review with an event handler on the .NET side probably using a timer or a threaded while terminated by the closing of the doc, since my .NET code always runs parallel with .AI running. Just the way that I do it (although I think that I'm the only one in the world that does it this way, or even uses .NET for scripting!).
Bummer. Back to my original dream that Illustrator had the capability and node-based gui for doing simple things like this. In Cinema 4D (which, of course, is more complex than Illustrator) I can just add a tag to an object, drag two things (like the null object and the text field) into xpresso, link up the attributes I want linked and voila! The artboard label (in this case a motext object) would be driven by the artboard name (in this case a null object). Handy for simpletons like me who are too A.D.D. for Javascript.
Any pointers on making the text fields area text instead of point text are appreciated. Same goes for pointers on styling the text from the script, perhaps with the use of an editable paragraph style.
Petros, it'll be nice if illustrator could do that, that sounds like a great help for non-programmers in Cinema 4D...but no, there's lots and lots of thing not accessible to scripting in Illustrator. Photoshop and Indesign are more robust.
Hi TT, do you think you'd be able to pull if off with .NET? if you find the time would you try? nothing major, just a simple text box that auto updates the artboard name whenever it changes...if it works, wouldn't it be too resource demanding?
Hey Carlos! I'll see what I can do -- make take a few days to get to it since I've got a lot going on. As far as being too resource demanding... you know if done properly, not at all. I used to think that way too until I learned differently.
SO I have to admit, when a really smart guy (as yourself) asks me to do something that I think is easy, I figure that I've DEFINITELY missed something. So I hope that I am wrong, but I threw this together in VB.NET and tested it and it works fine. Now there are a number of ways to do this and I am sure that I could refine it and make it more efficient if needed, but it works as a start. I don't know if VBA offers a timer, but if it does I think that it could be implemented fairly easily. If not, since it has to run concurrently with AI, I could compile it and offer it as a small executable but I don't know how others would feel about that. If they have VS 2008 Express or higher (and maybe even lower since there's not too much fancy stuff here) they might be able to opo in this code and compile it themselves.
Now as far as performance is concerned, this is setup for 100 artboards (the AI max). I've run it with 6 and it seems fine. I don't know which benchmark one would use to compare it. I'm open to testing it. I figured that I would stop here, though, just to make sure that you and I are on the same train.
VB.NET vs VBA or VB.NET vs VB (like V4)? I suspect that you would have little problems. I've seen your code and watched your thinking played out in the forum so, yeah, no sweat. Brain surgery is easy if you know what you are doing too, right? (apologies to all the brain surgeons out there...). Very similar, but WAY more robust. So my offer still stands -- at the AI Scripting Forum Christmas party, we'll find a quiet little corner and I'll teach you .NET and you teach me VBA. 15 minutes, tops. Whadda ya say?
Hmm, now I kind of want to have the artboard names driven by the text inside the text box located within the artboard instead of vice versa. Any ideas about how to access the text inside an existing text box? And/or finding a textbox inside the bounds of an artboard?
Search TextRange.Contents in the Scripting Reference PDF for accessing the text box text. As far as finding a particular textbox to use as a source, we'll need some more info on what we have to work with. Try to figure out what you think would be the best way to "snag" a particular entity and we can go from there. If it is possible to post an example, that would be helpful too. You can PM me one if you feel more comfortable. But please try to give this some thought yourself first.
All texts I wrote in a drawing, when exported to SVG files, were not anymore consistent: fragments of texts were overlapping each others.
I opened SVG file using a text reader and I discovered that my texts were unnecessarily fragmented in many parts that finally were badly rebuild in the code.
Yeah, now I can confirm that.
Despite SVG export settings are the same for both export methods, Export for screens provides a different code and break words in places where kerning pairs get applied (you can check it by setting the kerning to 0, which gives whole words with Export for Screens method).
The alignment gets shifted because lines get aligned from the left, and when a font gets changed, the width of a line does not match the more condensed one from the narrow font you used. Why the alignment changes though... Needs reviewing.
I have indeed seen that using Save as the SVG XML is coherent and well divided, but... the text is not centered when I open the SVG in Edge nor in Chrome: not centered as it was in the original AI file!
Please add the option to reduce number of s to the new Export As? For text-heavy SVGs (such as charts and infographics) this is a huge pain to deal with and a lot of time is wasted doing the manual "fixing" and optimization.
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