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I
inkotime
Participant
October 11, 2009
Question

Can the Illustrator SDK help me?

  • October 11, 2009
  • 1 reply
  • 1250 views

Hello,

I have a printing company, where we sell business cards onlines. We also have many Adobe Illustrator templates that we should for our business cards. Currently people place orders on our website and where they enter the text they would like on their business cards along with uploading a picture. We then take that text and picture, setup a proof in Illustrator. I was wondering if i could use the SDK to setup a proof online in real time for the customer and can the SDK then output the file as a EPS outlined so my designers dont have to do anything to setup the proof?         

Any help would be appreciated, and i'm looking for someone who could do this for me as well.

Thanks

This topic has been closed for replies.

1 reply

A. Patterson
A. Patterson
Inspiring
October 13, 2009

I'm not sure if the SDK is the answer to your problem. The SDK is primarily for writing plugins for Illustrator. Now, that means it could undoubtedly automate the task you're talking about but without knowing the details I would suspect that straight scripting would suffice for your needs. The greater probelm I would think is this requires Illustrator to run in some fashion, in order to execute the script. Neither Scripting nor the SDK lets you construct AI files (even simple ones) from scratch and then export them to a format without running Illustrator fully.

Now, I don't see why your online component couldn't generate the information needed in a form that a script couldn't later import and automatically spit out an EPS as requested. But if you're hoping to have the customer enter some information and immediately get emailed an EPS or be able to download it directly I'm not sure how feasible that is with AI. Though maybe the Adobe Enterprise stuff has something to let you do this kind of thing, I don't know. I think they do that kind of thing with InDesign, so maybe they have a way to make AI do something similar. If that's what you need, you might be better off phoning Adobe and asking them directly -- believe me, if they can do what you need, they'll be happy to sell you what you need

I
inkotimeAuthor
Participant
October 13, 2009

Well the thing is, the preview wont be in a EPS file to the customer. I could show the preview as a JPG even. But i would need a EPS file to look exactly like the jpg, because we cant have the customer to approve a preview file (say if we generate it w/o illustrator) and the actual file is slightly different than the preview file.

Right now this company, gets an order. Their designers setup a proof in AI and then export the proof as a jpg and upload it to their system as the proof. If the customer approves, they outline all text and send to print. That is the current flow, they're trying to get rid of the proofing stage where the customer could see their proof in real time so when the order is placed all they do is send the file to print. If this makes it a little bit clearer.

A. Patterson
A. Patterson
Inspiring
October 13, 2009

That does make it a little clearer, but I'm afraid my same reservatiosn apply. I think your best bet is to call Adobe and speak to one of the sales people on Illustrator and explain what you want to do. Lately they've been improving their inter-department communications and if Illustratot can do this kind of thing they should tell you that, or failing that they may direct you to the Enterprise Serve folks who might be able to help. Unfortunately, I don't know what the latter is capable of but I don't think Illustrator on its own is a great answer to your problem. I suspect you could script AI to load run a script that spits out a result, but AI is a pretty hefty beast. If there's only going to be one client doing this every so often and your web system can afford to wait a minute or two, this might be okay. Otherwise though you probably need something a little more sophisticated.

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