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scottr12917177
scottr12917177
Inspiring
January 21, 2016
Question

Batch processing hundreds of Illustrator files?

  • January 21, 2016
  • 1 reply
  • 3839 views

Good morning,

Our software has thousands of icons all created in Illustrator, and we need to batch export all icons from hundreds of .ai files. I am curious what solutions others have people have come up with?

Here is a list of what we are looking to do:

  • Ability to be called from the command-line
  • Ability to pass in what files to process
  • Ability to run in house scripts on loaded file
  • Ability to pass in the target folder to place the generated files
  • Ability to close Illustrator when we are finished

I would love to hear if any other developers have been faced with this issue, and how they solved it. I imagine other developers have been faced with this issue?

Cheers,

Scott

This topic has been closed for replies.

1 reply

Silly-V
Silly-V
Legend
January 21, 2016

So, you're going to have 1 file with many components which you're looking to batch-export, and you're looking to do this process in a batch as well?

scottr12917177
scottr12917177Author
Inspiring
January 21, 2016

Thanks for reply Silly-V.

Currently our files have anywhere from 5 - 100 icons on separate artboards.

We run a custom script that exports each artboard as separate .xml file(custom script generates a file with raw xml path data, custom properties, etc).

We want to open every .ai file in a directory path one at a time, run our internal export script generating .xml files, and save them to a specific location.

I was curious if anyone has needed to automated batching a lot of Illustrator files, and what would be the best approach? I am not necessarily looking for a solution, more interesting in hearing what is the preferred approach? VBScript? BridgeTalk? C#?

Thanks for sharing any thoughts!

Scott

Silly-V
Silly-V
Legend
January 21, 2016

It looks like what you want to do can be simply accomplished by using Illustrator's Actions and batch feature. You can make sure your script is inside the File > Scripts menu item and then you can record an action which uses this menu item (use "insert menu item" in the flyout menu to find this script in File > Scripts). Then you can batch-process all the files in a directory, and your XML file's destinations will need to be set by whatever the script has for its destination.

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