Best approach for accellerating batch export of jpgs/pngs

[aklyman]

To all who continously amaze me with their knowledge of scripting arcana.....here's some lead to transmogrify into gold.

I've ironed out kinks of how to script a batch-export metadata and generate bitmap artwork (of whatever type) for a complicated set of folders holding .ai files. My script finds all of the AI files, exports the metadata to a text file, captures and logs errors without crashing, and opens each file to generate my full-size thumbnail.

Works great, but isn't built for speed. The extraction of the metadata is blisteringly fast, but from what I can see I have to actually tell Illustrator to open the file before I can export the jpg or png, which forces illustrator to render the screen before doing the export.

Is there any way to speed this up? Opening in preview mode (not scriptable?) still results in the calculation of the visibility and blurs, even though they aren't displayed.

Would love to learn that I've made another beginner's assumption...maybe having bridge do it instead might be better?

Thanks all

-Alex

[Larry G. Schneider]

What happens if you set the app.visible to false?

[aklyman]

my documentation is telling me that app.visible is a read-only property...tried setting it to false without any effect.

If I want to decide the resolution, I think I'll just have to deal with the time it takes. No shortcuts.

[Muppet_Mark-phjQ9l]

Only *.psd export has the options for resolution… with the others it's 72dpi and you use scale ( PITA ) so if you do need a given resolution… first you need do the math and export then you need another app to resize… If your *.ai files are pdf compatible ( mine always are ) then you can just open in Photoshop…

[moluapple]

Base64 encoded thumbnail data is already stored in metadata, except the image quality is not so well. If this is ok for you, then no need to open file with Illustrator.

[Muppet_Mark-phjQ9l]

I think much will depend on your needs Bridge does has a couple of image capabilities see its Bitmap class but is restricted to RGBA & saving to *.jpg ( no transparency )… It can get Full Res Preview but it's only going to deal with the first artboard…