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fastasleep
Known Participant
April 15, 2017
Answered

Split text into individual paragraphs or lines?

  • April 15, 2017
  • 5 replies
  • 36507 views

Looking for something like the DivideTextFrame script on wundes.com which unfortunately do not seem to work with the current version of Illustrator.

Basically, when grabbing content from a doc to bring into Illustrator, such as four paragraphs of text which I want to put into four columns in a web layout (for example), I don't want to go back and forth 4 times copying and pasting, I'd rather be able to paste the whole chunk of content, then easily break it into four disparate text boxes in Illustrator, separated by paragraph, line break, line, or any combo of the above.

I'm surprised at how much trouble I'm having trying to find a way to do this. I can't be the only one wanting this kind of feature. There has to be a script or extension out there that does this. Help?

Correct answer adisababbba

Also for me - the script is conforming all text to whatever formatting is applied to the first character in the text frame.

However, I found a way to split into separate lines which seems to work, assuming that you text opacity is set to 100%. If your text is using transparency, it will get lost in this method:

  1. Select frame
  2. Main menu > Object > Flatten Tranparency...
  3. Hit OK
  4. Right-click on frame, choose Ungroup

5 replies

Participating Frequently
May 20, 2022

works fine in 2022. But it loses formatting, keeping the one in the first paragraph.

Participant
August 8, 2022

I'm having the same issue with the formatting. Were you able to find a workaround?

adisababbbaCorrect answer
Inspiring
May 19, 2023

Also for me - the script is conforming all text to whatever formatting is applied to the first character in the text frame.

However, I found a way to split into separate lines which seems to work, assuming that you text opacity is set to 100%. If your text is using transparency, it will get lost in this method:

  1. Select frame
  2. Main menu > Object > Flatten Tranparency...
  3. Hit OK
  4. Right-click on frame, choose Ungroup
Known Participant
May 3, 2022

Still works Adobe 26.2.1

EALS
Inspiring
October 31, 2021

It doesn't work anymore....

tromboniator
Community Expert
Community Expert
October 31, 2021

It does. Did you select the type object with the Selection Tool (rather than the type itself with the Type Tool)? Does the type contain paragraphs (returns)?

 

Peter

EALS
Inspiring
October 31, 2021

I've just tried it and you are right, it still works. My bad. Thks

Participant
October 18, 2021

This is a great script that's gonna save me a lot of time! It works in CC 2021 too. I dit notice though that the top layer in our document should be visible and unlocked, even if you work in an other layer.

Participant
January 21, 2022

yes dude! tried everything and the top layer was hidden and locked, fixed the issue, thanks!

Ton Frederiks
Community Expert
Community Expert
April 15, 2017

That script seems to work fine in 2017.1.0

fastasleep
Known Participant
April 19, 2017

Huh, I messed with it some more and was able to get it to work. Seems I may have had the text selected in the wrong manner (with the cursor within the copy I think), as I did the same thing again, but escaping out and selecting just the frame the second time, it worked fine. Thanks! The join text frames script is also finicky but was able to get that to work with a bit more fitting as well.