The scripting section seems to be close to dying

[femkeblanco]

There seems to be just three or four active posts per day on average, sometimes just one to two, and even these are oftentimes just bumped old posts. Scripters who were active when I started frequenting this forum during the pandemic seem to have gone for good. Those still around seem to be posting less and less.

Has ChatGPT rendered the scripting section no longer useful? Is everything that's possible with Illustrator scripting been done, and there is nothing more to add? Is it the lack of investment in Illustrator scripting?

But the main point of this post is to ask if scripters, and people looking for scripting help, have gone elsewhere? I know there is a general "Coding Corner" community, but that seems to be even less active than here.

[m1b]

Hi @femkeblanco, good question! I don't have any good explanation. I'm still answering the occasional scripting question here. My last three answers were here, here and here. (Did you see notifications for these? Maybe the notification aren't getting to you?) I've been answering less than I used to, but mostly because I've been struggling to find the time.

As for ChatGPT, I use it almost every day to help me throw together little functions which (mostly) saves me time to do myself. I imagine that many users are able to get usable scripts out of it and that it will be improving all the time. Soon enough it will no longer make weird mistakes where it just invents a method call that doesn't exist! I think we've been seeing less posts of "ChatGPT wrote me a script and it doesn't work—can you help?" so maybe this is a sign that ChatGPT is getting better.

I don't know of anywhere else that is more active than here for scripting questions. But I haven't been looking, so that doesn't mean much. Stack Exchange? Reddit?

- Mark

[Sergey Osokin]

To ask questions about scripts, Adobe users need to know about scripts in general. Also, users from different countries should know about this forum. There are communities scattered all over the web where people rarely ask each other questions about scripts.

Adobe has created an Exchange marketplace, but has done nothing to popularize scripts.

I prefer to be active in my social networks and talk about scripts there. And respond in direct messages.

Still, the forum is good as a knowledge base because search engines index it and we can use Google to find similar discussions for problem solving.

[Jacob Bugge]

Femke,

I believe the changes have an even wider range, covering everything related to the actual deliberate creation of customized specific artwork, giving way to easy generic/random solutions including automatic production of material based on reuse/reproduction/blending of elements from existing sources.

In other words, there seems to be a general change from creation of own artwork to having something made.

Apart from that, in many cases scripting can be (part of) the solution unknown to the asker, especially in connexion with repetitive work (often only stated by the asker when a customized solution is presented), so there is a number of hidden potential scripting threads which may be spotted; I try to mention (sometimes an outline of) a scripting option in such threads.

[Kurt Gold]

Hmh, probably you have particular expectations, Femke, but I do not see any noteworthy dwindling at the moment. Just a normal seasonal fluctuation perhaps.

As far as I can see, there are questions about scripting almost everyday (as you already mentioned). During the last year more than 600 requests for sure. That's not "close to dying", is it?

And yes, people come and people go. That's true in this forum since it exists, that is about 25 years.

Am I overlooking something?

[CarlosCanto]

femke, I think mark, jacob, sergey and kurt covered all points. I agree with all of them.

I think the scripting volume is about standard, I've noticed the times when we have had a lot of questions is when someone ventures to learn scripting and asks a ton of question in the process. But those users are scarce, there arent' many of them, even before ChatGPT of easy content creation tools like Express or Figma. Once they learn, they move on, the forum goes dry for a while until someone else gets curious about scripting.

I've been lurking on the young people's Discord illustrator channel for a while and haven't seen any scripting questions, so I think this forum is still king when it comes to scripting traffic.

[CarlosCanto]

one more comment, there are users that come with "I need a script that does ABC". We're generous beings and we give it to them. They get excited and can't believe how easy it was, all you have to do is ask! they come back with another request, again they get lucky, there are a few of us willing to help. Then they think they found a gold mine and start demanding free work from us. At some point we all ignore those users, they get tired of waiting and leave. The forum goes dry for a while until the next user finds gold.

[Jacob Bugge]

Carlos,

It is sorrowing to hear about that kind of gold digging, which is very rare in connexion with non scripting customized solutions where almost all recurring askers have presented pleasant challenges and been eager and able to elaborate.

[m1b]

Haha, yes. I get loads of private messages from users asking for more, but very rarely are willing to reimburse me for my time. Sometimes I am basically "hounded" for free work!

But I just leave those quietly sitting in my inbox, unanswered unless it suits me. I enjoy scripting, so I do it anyway when I have time, and of course I prefer the fun scripts to the boring scripts. I am happy to be paid for them sometimes, too! 🙂

- Mark

[CarlosCanto]

I hear you Mark, I don't mind writing script and give them away, but time is limited I have to pick and choose the ones that won't take me too much time.

now, researching trying to find a solution that seems impossible, that's my thing, I can't stay away from those Lollll, I spent too much time on trial and errors to come up empty handed most of the time.

[Jacob Bugge]

Carlos, "trying to find a solution that seems impossible", and no less a solution that someone declares impossible, is also hard to resist for me, albeit in the area of customized specific artwork made by drawing rather than scripting.

[CarlosCanto]

those are the most fun Jacob 🙂

[Jacob Bugge]

Indeed, Carlos.

[Sergey Osokin]

Maybe everyone on this Discord channel knows how to find scripts on the Internet and write with ChatGPT? Just kidding, more likely many users haven't even heard of scripts, plugins.

I thought about doing YouTube Shorts about other authors' scripts in addition to my own. But 60-second video take a hell of a lot of time to find good vector graphics to demonstrate the script and to record. And there are so many unfinished projects paid for by customers.

[CarlosCanto]

yeah, same problem here, it's hard to find/make good graphics to demo the script.

your demos are great by the way. I loved them.

[Inventsable]

There's still plenty that can be done though every day more script solutions are Google searches away so don't need bespoke scripting, but I think the unfortunate truth is that the Scripting API has been stagnant for so long that most innovative ideas need to be done in CEP in the first place -- and that's even on it's way out in favor of UXP, which will bring with it an entirely different (and hopefully modern) scripting API.

[m1b]

It strikes me that it won't be too long, perhaps, that LLM-type systems will interface with an app's API directly—possibly on a lower-level than scripting—to *do what you ask them to do*. For this to be the future Adobe would have to vastly improve the quality and scope of their app's APIs, with Illustrator being a poster child of neglect in this area.

- Mark

[Inventsable]

Ironically that's already been done in CEP like Hyperbrew's KlutzGPT extension, with that name because it's not very reliable lol. I do think that's the likely direction of low-level user interaction in future too, but I'd hope that Adobe is too developer-conscious to limit integration to only that.

I've just been openly skeptical and critical of UXP's ground-up design approach from the very beginning and tentatively expecting that by the time Illustrator even gets UXP, that UXP itself will be as old as CEP was when Adobe decided to replace it. But since CEP had a Chromium backbone it could inherit new Chromium features whereas UXP updates will have to be done manually by hand, meaning unless it's impeccably updated, it'll fall behind far faster. Even companies as large as Microsoft don't create ground-up extensibility platforms for Visual Studio because they want a hands-off approach in keeping it 1:1 with modern development 🤷

Anyway I think it's a combination of most things already stated, but also to be fair the Adobe forums themselves have never been too active and I see plenty of scripting activity on other platforms like Discord and Reddit. I still wish we had a separate Illustrator scripting forum since it's now next to impossible to search for scripting solutions here due to fuzzy keyword matching hundreds of general Illustrator posts. The good old days of having a dedicated, separate forum specifically for Illustrator scripting...

[m1b]

Yes exactly. And Klutz is right, in part due to deficiencies in the current LLMs but also due to the app's API. If I ask chatGPT to "give me a function that, given an Illustrator envelope (PluginItem), will return all TextFrame objects contained in the envelope" I will get a perfectly coherent script that is consistent with Illustrator's other objects, but it fails because Illustrator's API for envelope objects was never properly implemented.

Another thing that will be critical would be the ability to run scripts and undo them with 100% confidence. So we can tell the LLM to—for example—"arrange the selected items in a 5x5 grid with 20mm between centers in both dimensions"... and then next tell it "okay, how about 25mm", and then "try 6 columns", etc. all while having a robust undo stack. In Illustrator's case, this seems like almost too much to hope for!

- Mark

[m1b]

Oh and your example of Visual Studio—actually I'm thinking of VSCode myself—is very apt.

[CarlosCanto]

I've just been openly skeptical and critical of UXP's ground-up design approach from the very beginning and tentatively expecting that by the time Illustrator even gets UXP, that UXP itself will be as old as CEP was when Adobe decided to replace it.

By @Inventsable

bold prediction, love it