How to select an object?

Hi @andyf65867865, the examples you gave are fine. That is a normal way of selecting an item in Illustrator via scripting—nothing wrong with it, or missing. I think what you are concerned about is that you can't *see* the selection until after the script finishes when the UI updates. For example, see this code:

(function () {

    var doc = app.activeDocument,
        item = doc.pageItems[0];

    // clear selection
    doc.selection = [];

    item.selected = true;

    // app.redraw();

    if (doc.selection[0] === item)
        alert('Item is selected');

})();

If you run this (assuming your document has at least one page item and nothing is selected) it will select `item` and—if it confirms that the selection contains `item`—give an alert. So, when the alert appears, we can be sure that `item` is surely selected. However at this point we can't *see* it selected—it still appears that nothing is selected. This is simply because the UI doesn't get updated in the middle of a script (except for certain operations). To make the screen update, that is where a call to app.redraw()—commented out for now—is useful, but it's important to understand that it doesn't do anything except update the screen—the `item` is already selected no matter if you do app.redraw() or not, and the redraw will happen as soon as the script is finished anyway.

By the way, for some reason selecting objects in Illustrator is *sloooow*. So if you are looping through page items and setting selected = true on each it will be very slow. A quicker way is to put the items into an array and then do:

doc.selection = myItems;

- Mark

P.S. I forgot to add, every time you use app.redraw() it starts a new Undo record, so if you do a loop of 20 operations without app.redraw() they will Undo in one go, but if you app.redraw() inside the loop, you will have to Undo 20 times to go back to the starting state. Sometimes this is desirable, but not often.

you can find such tips, but I found that they don’t always work

app.redraw();
// or
// textFrame.translate(0, 0);

strange as it may seem, but the following works, according to the sample from @m1b , if used before setting the selection

doc.selection = [];