measure the length of a path in Illustrator

I wish Adobe would add measurement values for object area into the Document Info panel. It's nice being able to quickly and easily determine path lengths in that panel, but path area is an equally important value. The old Telegraphics Path Area plug-in was great for that (it would provide both path length and area of any selected objects).

One alternative is using the Dynamic Measure tool in Astute Graphics' VectorScribe plug-in. It has all sorts of useful features. Unfortunately the user must manually select (or hover on the edge of) paths one at a time using the Dynamic Measure tool to see path length and area. Then you have to write down the results of each path and add the values to get the total. That's a kludge. There is no way to select multiple objects, such as a group of letters you're going to cut out of aluminum on a routing table, all at once and get an area value. The old Telegraphics plug-in did that in a snap.

amazing, thank you

Thanks to everyone for their help in creating this script. We've been using it for months and it works great on simple closed path objects. My question is this:

Is there any way to rebuild this script to find the area of a compound path?

I have no scripting knowledge to do it myself and I am in need of some help. Actually there are some fairy daft people in our studio who cannot add, subtract or multiply properly and they are making our studio as a whole look like imbeciles. If we had a script that we could run through an Illustrator Action then we could likely put an end to the 3" x 1" label having an area of slightly over 5 square inches.  Yes.    I know.

Currently, running the above scripts on a complex compound path (let's just say a Swiss cheese, square shape for ease of visualization) will result in the addition of each path's area. For instance, the outer square will be one path and each hole in the piece of cheese is another path. All of these paths are added together to give a result of much more than the area of the outside square if it had no holes in it.

My suggestion to our IT guy to solve this (which would still work for simple shapes as well) was to ask the script to subtract any smaller value from any larger value until there was only one value left. He said that is a pretty simple script to write, but he is very busy and hasn't had time to do it. It's been over 7 months. I hate bugging him for it because his daily problems are more crucial to the business than a simple script for one of the hundred softwares we are using. It probably seems like a trivial thing for him and I don't fault him for that.

I am usually pretty good at reverse engineering, so figuring out what the language in the script above related to and what it did was easy enough. I just have no new language to throw at it to ask it to do the rest. Every attempt I've made to alter the script above to suit my needs resulted in utter failure. It was sort of like trying to order Chinese food from an Italian menu using musical notes and hand grenades - I know I want food, this place makes food, can it make this kind of food if I throw enough random nonsense at it? Not likely. I gave up and decided to ask for help.

Help.

Please see the bold text above for a rehash of what I was trying to do. Is this truly a simple script to write or was he just trying to shoo me away?

Thanks.

Michele,

In newer versions you can find the path length in the Info or Document Info palette/panel (I think, I cannot remember which).

Or you can find it in the secret debugging palette (Ctrl+Alt+Shift+F12 or Cmd+Option+Shift+F12).

Or you can use something like the free Pathllegth or Patharea filter available here:

http://www.telegraphics.com.au/sw/browse/Filters