The limitations of Illustrator CC 2018 Actions

[runninghead_design]

Hi,

I'm recording Actions to in Illustrator CC 2018 ( 22.1) and I've found a few things lacking:

1) When I group objects, and name the group, while recording an action the name does not get recorded.

The group just bears the name "group".

2) If you choose "Expand" while recording an action and choose from the available options (Fill, Stroke, etc), you are asked to make that choice again when the action runs- not much of an Action! .

Aside from the above I find the lack of Conditional Action, as per Photoshop, features disappointing.

Are there any fixes for the above flaws or is my version of Illustrator not behaving as expected?

I just don't know.

Thanks

[Monika Gause · Accepted solution]

Please post this to http://illustrator.uservoice.com

[runninghead_design]

Posted as a bug report on voice, as per above.

[Stephen_A_Marsh]

I hate to be negative, but…

I'm recording Actions to in Illustrator CC 2018 ( 22.1) and I've found a few things lacking:

That is the general consensus.

or is my version of Illustrator not behaving as expected?

Sadly this sounds about right.

Photoshop has set very high expectations with actions.

[Mike_Sofa-4sKsB9]

You can suppress the "Expand..." dialog in an action by toggling off the modal control. That's the 2nd column in the Actions panel.

[rcraighead]

Yes, AI Actions are disappointing. There ARE some people on this forum though, who can do some amazing things with them!

That said, If you're serious about automation but aren't fully proficient in scripting you may want to try "Keyboard Maestro" (Mac-only). It's a powerful macro-building tool that plays well with Adobe products (and most other Mac software).

[runninghead_design]

Thanks folks.

Just posting to report how frustrating this still is, having spent a few hours trying to make a fairly simple action only to find that less than half of the steps actually get recorded (renaming of layers ignored, creation of patterns ignored, etc).
It's great that some remarkable things can be achieved with AI's existing Action functionality. Yey.

In my opinion though there are just too many flaws in Action recording to make it reliable so I resist resorting to it now.

It's just not professionally implemented functionality, like they just launched it at beta!

BTW: I'll not be filing yet another bug report or feature request this morning as I'm certain that Adobe are well aware already.

It's just their unwillingness to devote the necessary resources to improve these basic aspects of AI that prevents progress.

[designu46483552]

Totally agree with you runinghead_design.

I tried to just record a simple step today- you have an object selected, shift and click to select the layer above (basically just selecting two objects in your layer stack) then on to the next step in your Action (eg- Make Blend).

Trouble is you can't- that one simple action won't get recorded by your action and there's no keyboard shortcut workaround AFAIK.

I'm sure the number of post about Illustrator Actions would increase if only people used them more.

With more posts about Actions in AI maybe Adobe would put some work in to improving them?

[Doug A Roberts]

I'm sure Adobe engineers are somewhat aware of these things, but because of the voting system they have going now, the only things that are going to get changed are those with the votes. So there are only two things we can do:

1. Report issues and vote, vote, vote

2. Join the prerelease program and harp on about it there.