Custom Swatch Panel

[Hitz_M]

Hello,

I want to create a custom color swatch panel for Illustrator. But I cant figure out a way to add swatches to the panel and drag/drop them into file.

Kindly guide me to an example or the steps required to build such a panel.

I've created a panel using CS Extension builder but cant figure out how to populate it with swatches.

Thanks

[A. Patterson]

There's no example or good set of steps for doing that. Getting a list of swatches in the document is fairly easy (AISwatchListSuite) but turning that into nice thumbnails of the swatches is actually something AI doesn't provide. We have to internally render them off-screen and convert them into our own image class for rendering in our UI (we use Qt). I don't know what you'd have to do to turn that into icons for CS Extensions, since I've never used that.

Drag & drop is a whole other problem. That'll be entirely CS Extensions though. Assuming you have them rendered nicely in your panel, and the extension API lets you do things like drag & drop into the file, it would be fairly easy to apply the specified swatch to the object. I'd be surprised if that D&D functionality was there though. But I know very little of the CS Extension Manager so don't trust my opinion on that!

[Toto RoToTO]

To achieve what you want to do, you could use Flash / Extension Builder to create your swatch.

Then you will have to implement Drag & Drop, using flex Drag and Drop.

So, you could drag and drop from Illustrator to your swatch and from your swatch to Illustrator.

This could be achieved without using a plugin. (Only Extension).

Thomas.

[Hitz_M]

I used the CS Extension to design the panel and flex to drag drop.

However the swatch created is a bitmap image and doesnot behave like the illustrator swatch. Is creating a swatch similar to Illustrator possible using CSExtension & Flex?

[Toto RoToTO]

You have to use FlashBuilder and Extension builder to be able to create an extension that could be added to Illustrator or Photoshop.

So then you could create an extension project that could be added to Illustrator or whatever.

The extension you will create, will behave as a native illustrator swatch.