Of course, after I had a moment to look at the code that Bing spit out at me I found the mistake.
Rather than just asking for artboard.name it tried to define a variable for it, then use that. Sure, that's fairly standard. But it had this in the code:
var name = artboard.name;
artboardNames.push(name);
The text file it gave me was the correct number of artboards, so I knew Part of it worked, but every text entry was just "Adobe Illustrator"
So I looked back through the code. I didn't get any errors. I don't know much about illustrator scripting yet, but I was guessing that "name" might be something reserved for a global variable. It sure would be nice if it gave an error to that effect. This has been my frustration with attempting to learn any programming language because it's not the language part that is difficult. It's trying to tie the language with Illustrator, or Blender, or Windows, etc.
Anyway, here's the code that works.
Run it (you can drag and drop the file onto illustrator for those who may not know) and it will save a text file on your desktop of all of the artboard names in order.
Do some find and replace, whatever you need. Save that text file, then come back to illustrator and press the button that asks if you want to update the names. And the artboard names get updated to whatever you changed them to.
Keep in mind, I am not a programmer, and I did not write this. Artificial (not quite so) Intelligence finding a bunch of bits and pieces of script and smashing it together. So if you do something silly, like add a line return then it will fail. I see it Was nice enough to think of that potential error and is supposed to give an error instead of changing the names. But I didn't test that out. I just read through it. It looked correct. I saved a copy of the file I was working on, tried it, and it worked.
So use at your own risk.
// This script will export all of the artboard names in order, which can be edited in a text editor, then use that text file to update the artboard names in the file.
// Define the file name and path for the text file
var fileName = "artboard_names.txt";
var filePath = Folder.desktop + "/" + fileName;
// Get the document and the number of artboards
var doc = app.activeDocument;
var numArtboards = doc.artboards.length;
// Create an array to store the artboard names
var artboardNames = [];
// Loop through the artboards and push their names to the array
for (var i = 0; i < numArtboards; i++) {
var artboard = doc.artboards[i];
artboardNames.push(artboard.name);
}
// Write the array to the text file, separated by newlines
var file = new File(filePath);
file.open("w");
file.write(artboardNames.join("\n"));
file.close();
// Display a message that the file has been created
alert("The file " + fileName + " has been created on your desktop. You can edit it in a text editor and then run this script again to update the artboard names.");
// Ask the user if they want to update the artboard names from the text file
var answer = confirm("Do you want to update the artboard names from the text file?");
// If yes, read the text file and update the artboard names
if (answer) {
// Open the text file and read its contents
var file = new File(filePath);
file.open("r");
var contents = file.read();
file.close();
// Split the contents by newlines and store them in an array
var newNames = contents.split("\n");
// Check if the number of new names matches the number of artboards
if (newNames.length == numArtboards) {
// Loop through the artboards and update their names from the array
for (var i = 0; i < numArtboards; i++) {
var artboard = doc.artboards[i];
var newName = newNames[i];
artboard.name = newName;
}
// Display a message that the artboard names have been updated
alert("The artboard names have been updated from the text file.");
} else {
// Display a message that the number of new names does not match the number of artboards
alert("The number of new names in the text file does not match the number of artboards. Please make sure they are equal and try again.");
}
}
1 Correct answer
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