Illustrator Transform Effect Count Field through Scripting

@jduncan is right. We don't have any access to anything but the basic appearance properties. We can add a new live effect but not modify an existing one (at least not via the scripting API—there are theoretically other ways, such as using the SDK perhaps, or even modifying the raw .ai file).

The best you could do in this case is something hacky like: duplicate, then expand the effect, then analyse the result to see how many copies it made, then remove the duplicate expanded objects, then reduce the object to the default basic appearance, then recreate it's basic appearance, then apply the live effect with the new value based on the number you found in the analysis step.

I'm not seriously suggesting you do that, but it seems possible to do.

Another approach—less-hacky and more reliable—would be to do the transform effect entirely by a script and group the resulting items with metadata continaing properties of the transform, such as distance translated and number of copies. Maybe a group that named a certain way could be interpreted by the script as an ersatz 'Transformed object"—so if there are, say, three items in the group then they are automatically considered copies of the first item, and the "count" is 3, and the distance [dx, dy] between the first and second items are the translation amounts. That script would then allow you to change the number and distances, etc quite easily. I like this idea.

- Mark

Can you elaborate on what you mean by "count field"?