Add author information on open (or save)

[JackelopeGA2]

Is there a way to have illustrator to apply the author information on open (or save)?

Example:

Person A starts new document, author information is listed as "person a".

Person B opens document just to print, closes without save, author info stays "person a"

Person C opens document, makes a few changes, hits save (or close/save), author is changed to "person c"

thanks!

[Silly-V · Accepted solution]

Not with a script, but perhaps with an extension there's a way to listen for document-open events in order to execute your own code. If you have an extension running in the background, it may be able to execute these custom routines for you.

However, you can get by with just a script, if you command the persons to use a saving script to save all their files. Such a script would add info to the file XMP and then save the document as wanted. It could be a button on a palette, so all they'd have to do is click, but it wouldn't be native document open/save events doing this process.

[Stephen Marsh]

Filed under potentially useful…

When you install Illustrator, a user name and a serial number is entered (look under the Help menu, System Info). This user name may or may not be unique to each installation.

This user name is updated into the metadata of every illustrator AI and PDF file when saved (I only tested these formats).

Using ExifTool, this can be observed using the following command:

exiftool -PostScript:For 'mac os/path/to/file.ai'

exiftool -PostScript:For "windows os\path\to\file.ai"

[JackelopeGA2]

thanks! that will show it using terminal command, but when viewing with illustrator / acrobat, author is still blank.

but this should work

[Stephen Marsh]

Indeed, however I was meaning that a script could potentially copy this data into the required standard metadata field, if the value was unique.

Otherwise it is possible to use ExifTool to copy this value from one tag to another, however this would be manually performed at the OS level (or perhaps automated at set intervals) and not in the application which is better performed at save time in Illustrator.