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Participant
August 21, 2019
Question

Action to 'Save As' to child folders

  • August 21, 2019
  • 1 reply
  • 318 views

Hi everyone,

I work for a publishing company that creates ads for multiple publications and part of my job is to design an ad in Illustrator, and save it as a PDF in it's lowest quality for proofing and another PDF in it's highest quality for press. This is a bit tedious so I've set up an action to automatically save the Illustrator as two PDF files and in two different folder locations but I discovered I need to create this action each month and for each publication because the 'Save As' function saves the PDF to a certain folder location path.

The file system is always the same each month for each publication:

  • Publication name
    • Year
      • Month
        • Ads
          • Proofing
            • (Low res PDF files)
          • PDF
            • (High res PDF files)
          • (Illustrator files)
        • Editorial
        • Layout

Currently the save as function has a path like '/User/Publication/Year/Month/Ads/Proofing' so when I move onto the next month and use the same Action it overwrites the previous months files. Is there a way to set up a 'Save As' function that saves the PDF files in the correct child folders automatically so I don't have to keep creating new Action's every month for each publication?

I hope that all makes sense. It's a bit of a tricky one to explain.

Thanks in advance. Matt

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1 reply

Grant H
Community Expert
Community Expert
September 12, 2019

your action would need to be combined with a script telling ai to save in "current month" - folder. you wont be able to dynamicaly change the month (for eg) without changing the folder in the action with out one. I suppose you could also create a "watched folder" and run a folder script depending on your OS which would run on certain events but that is not an elegant solution.

Inspiring
September 12, 2019
If it's possible to include all the needed info of your directory structure inside your file you should be able to use these to create a save path for your files depending on them.