Explore related tutorials & articles
14
Replies
Ooooh. You're in for such a fun and rewarding and... at times infuriating.. but mostly rewarding, journey! Welcome aboard!
First step is to familiarize yourself with the Illustrator Javascript DOM (Document Object Model). A good place to start is the "container objects" as I call them. These are the objects that can hold other objects. Examples: Document, Layer, Group.
Let's start as basic as possible. Open a new document and create a single text frame on the artboard. Then open up your IDE or debugger of choice. Paste this into your IDE:
function test()
{
var myText = app.activeDocument.layers[0].textFrames[0];
alert(myText.contents);
}
test();
Wow! what a mess. What's going on there? Let's break down that big long string of nonsense. You can usually do this by separating the line at each "."
app - activeDocument - layers[0] - textFrames[0]
app is the application constant
activeDocument refers to the currently active document object.
(You could access items at this scope if you'd like, but trust me, it's a better idea to get used to utilizing narrower scopes.)
layers[0] is the first layer object in the active document.
(in javascript, counting starts at 0, so when you want the first layer, you reference it by 0, and when you want the 3rd layer, you reference it by 2, etc.)
textFrames[0] as you might guess, refers to the first text frame in the first layer of the document.
(textFrame is the generic name for any kind of text object in illustrator.. regular point text, area text, text on a path, etc.)
Ok. So we've broken down the components of that variable declaration. So, at the end of that line, the myText variable will hold the text object you created in your document. Now, in the next line, we're using the alert() method to display the "contents" of the myText variable. The contents property of a textFrame is the text that is displayed in illustrator.
(To view the other properties of the textFrame object.. or... any other object in the dom, look here.)
Try to make some edits to my snippet above. Use the documentation in the link above to change or view some other properties of the textFrame object. Maybe use the textFrames.add() method to create and edit some new text frames.
By all means come on back with any questions you come up with. But the best thing you can do is to experiment and have fun!
Hi Radiosity,
You are right to look for a good javascript tutorial. Many tutorials are geared towards web development which can be confusing. Also one important gotcha is that the "javascript" you want for scripting Illustrator is actually "ExtendScript", which is like javascript 3 from 1999. Javascript itself has evolved considerably, while ExtendScript has not, so a modern javscript tutorial will cover many things that won't work for us.
Here is one way to target text items (or any page items): Create text in the normal way and change its name in the Layers palette to something your script will use to target it (I've used "job-number" in my example).
Example script snippet:
var jobNumber = 'ABC1234';
var jobNumberTextFrame = app.activeDocument.textFrames.getByName("job-number");
if (jobNumberTextFrame != undefined) {
jobNumberTextFrame.contents = jobNumber;
}
Regards,
Mark
AdChoices