X,Y location of Freeform Gradient Points

[ohhhsea]

Has anyone discovered how to identify the EXACT (x,y) coordinates of the points in a free form gradient?

Yes, I know you could drag guides and get generally close, however we are trying to find the exact coordinates. 

Any help would be appreciated!

Cheers

[Tom Coolen]

Hi there @ohhhsea , ever found a solution for this?

I'm currently needing to have these coordinates to give to an engineering team. 

Cheers!

[Ton Frederiks]

That may be a feature request:

https://illustrator.uservoice.com

[Mike_Gondek]

There is nothing I know of inside the application to get 100.00% accurate coordinates on freeform gradient stops. You can also use window >> info and hover over the gradietn stop, but that is as accurate as pulling guides, just quicker.

You would need need a script to pull from the code.
@CarlosCanto 

Gradients are quite forgiving with the color chanegs being subtle over an area rather than hard stop changes of a noise type gradient. Have to ask: do you really need this level of accuracy?

[Tom Coolen]

@Mike_Gondek I've got a gradient with over 70 stops and I'm asked to give coordinates for an engeneering team that wants to try and create it by programming. There are a few plug-ins where you can measure different kinds of objects etc. and have them all neatly put out with text, lines and such. So I could draw dots on theplace of one of these freeform gradient stops, but either I'm missing something, or it isn't really suited for the ask. 

[CarlosCanto]

hi @Mike_Gondek and @Tom Coolen  It might be possible to pull the info out of the file.

in this sample I made a triangle with one side sitting on the horizon, applied freeform gradient and left the default 3 points at each corner.

then, saved the file uncompressed, then opened it with a text editor and searched for "ColorPoints"

as you can see below, the color of each gradient point is listed in each line that ends with a k, the four values are the cmyk values in decimal format

the next line gives you five numbers, the last two are the x,y coordinates of the point. I'm pretty sure the numbers represent the percentage of the size of the shape, so 0.5 would be in the middle of the shape.

/SmoothShadingStyle : (Adobe Diffusion Coloring Style) 3 /ColorPoints ,
0 O
0.597222805023193 0 0.883298993110657 0 k
1 w
1 1 0 0.074999953727292 0.949999974130389
/ColorPoint ,
0.885343670845032 0.808224558830261 0 0 k
1 1 0 0.925000030347277 0.949999974130389
/ColorPoint ,
0.088502325117588 0.152040883898735 0.31189438700676 0 k
1 1 0 0.499999992037285 0.100000000032654
/ColorPoint ,

since the engineers are writing their own program, give them that portion of the text, they should be able to figure it out.

hope it helps

Carlos

[Tom Coolen]

Thank you very much, going to give this a go. Appreciate your generosity. 

[Manaus]

So it would be possible to parse a Illustrator file to access the data related to freeform gradients?

I wanted to find a way to know the position and colors of a selected freeform gradient so its easier to replicate in After Effects, for example.

But since theres no API for that, I'm searching for options and this gave me some hope @CarlosCanto!

[CarlosCanto]

@Manaus yeah, let us know if you find a solution following the steps I described above. thanks

[aTomician]

No is my short answer but having come up against this problem, I've resolved it by manually building an SVG where I can exactly specify each point of the gradient.  By blending together several gradients, you can achieve a similar effect, which can then be imported into Illustrator for further work.  (May want to import into inkscape first as sometimes Illustrator is as terrible as importing SVG's as it is at exporting them.

Here's a link to an example I built for a project, stacking 4 gradients together: https://stackoverflow.com/a/78554074/6312186