Scripting in vector graphics software other than illustrator

[femkeblanco]

More vector graphics editors than not are said to have scripting support.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_vector_graphics_editors#Basic_features

- Has anyone tried scripting in any of them?
- What programming languages do they use?
- How good is the scripting support (what you can do with scripting, documentation and user community)?

Thanks in advance. 

[CarlosCanto · Accepted solution]

I briefly played with Visio many years ago, but I had no use for it so I stopped. It uses VBA, which is awesome. I'm not sure how long Microsoft will support it though.

CorelDraw also uses VBA, I have never played with it though.

[Silly-V · Accepted solution]

CorelDRAW offers the most intuitive but Windows-only oriented scripting API. They have a built-in script editor which looks and acts a lot like Excel's but it's even better because it seems to offer auto-completion with no extra work on your part.

The documentation is all centralized and easily-found.

Compared to us Adobe users, a CD app has built-in "ESTK" which you don't have to hunt down or get extensions for VSCode for (although surely there are those, or at least someone can use something to write VBA in VSCode and still get the auto-completion), and to make a "CEP" extension, or "docker" panel as they are called  in CD it doesn't take a scientist to read all the separate articles for all the separate versions, or have to do a lot of what we got to do, you can start messing around with an HTML-enabled panel right away.

They also have javascript in a limited form, but probably good enough to where one can do a lot with JS and do only some necessary parts via VBA.

https://community.coreldraw.com/sdk/w/articles/349/using-javascript-with-coreldraw

So, while I have written a total of 1 scripts for CorelDRAW, and ~1000++ scripts for Adobe stuff, I do say that CD has really got it going on with its automation capabilities they provide.

However the gravy-train sort-of ends when you are trying to cater to cross-platform users. The official Corel advice is to get Parallels to run Windows on your Mac. There is a Mac version of CorelDRAW and it has some javascript automation too, I have tried to check it out around 2018 - the whole app is a bit different so you can definitely tell it's a different whole application and it's got different stuff in it visually and functionally. The javascript portion of that was really limited and I think (at that time) you could forget about making "one script" that does the exact same thing in exactly the same way that will work both for Mac and Windows.