To clarify, alternates use different Unicode codepoints to the canonical characters, typically somewhere in the U+E000–U+F8FF private use range. To insert alternate characters in AI using JSX, you need to know their codepoints.   e.g. OP might build a lookup table that maps the canonical A–Z, a–z, etc characters to their alternates. For each character in the original text, look up its alternate characters, pick one at random, and substitute:   var characterMap = { 'A': 'A\ue001\ue002\ue003', 'B': 'B\ue004\ue005\ue006', 'C': ... }; var oldText = someTextFrame.contents; var newText = ''; for (var i = 0; i < oldText.length; i++) { var c = oldText[i]; var alternates = characterMap[c]; if (alternates) { c = alternates[Math.floor(Math.random() * alternates.length)]; } newText += c; } someTextFrame.contents = newText;     FontForge is ugly but free and should suffice for examining the generated font’s glyph table to determine the alternates’ code points. ... View more

> Anything that is on the Internet can be decoded, hacked, cracked.   It’s not even that. It’s a complete misunderstanding of what PDF’s password feature does and does not do. Password locking in XLSX and PDF files are entirely trust-based, used to discourage accidental editing/casual tampering only. They do not provide any security.   The intractable problem here is that the file’s content cannot be encrypted: the data has to remain fully readable at all times for the file to be viewable. All passwording does is set a “do not copy/edit” flag within that file. Excel and Acrobat voluntarily respect that flag when opening the file, asking the user to enter the password before they will turn it off. Other apps have zero obligation to respect this flag, and it is trivial to write a script to delete that flag from the file so Excel and Acrobat can also edit it without asking for a password.   …   If OP is worried about dishonest customers refusing to pay for the finished vector files since they can unlock and use the approval PDFs, s/he has two options regarding the files themselves:   1. Don’t send vector files for approval. Provide medium-resolution bitmaps only, with a watermark or other indication these preview files are for design approval only. If the customer is a complete hack they’ll probably use those anyway, but any self-respecting client will want the high-quality vector originals. If your market is full of cheapskates, tell customers up front that you will require full payment before sending the final files; you may also want part payment in advance so even if they stiff you later you’re not entirely out of pocket.   2. Send them the high-quality vector files for approval and don’t bother with any password nonsense (all that does is annoy your honest customers). If a customer subsequently refuses to pay you for the work you’ve done, proceed according to the procedure stated in your contract. The first step is sending written notice that payment is now overdue by X days and must be paid in full no later than Y date. Sometimes a customer fails to receive your original invoice (e.g. your email was caught in an over-sensitive spam filter) or makes an honest mistake (e.g. forgetting to pass it onto Accounts Payable). If they fail to respond by Y, you can escalate to your lawyer who will send a legal nastygram, to small claims court, and ultimately passing their delinquent account to a debt collection agency to pursue. Or you may choose to write it off as one-time loss if it’s not worth the time and expense of pursuing them; just one of the costs of doing business. (Either way, if they haven’t paid up by Y, blacklist that customer and never do work for them again. Fool you twice…)   (@OP: You do have written, signed contracts with all your customers, don’t you? If not, the only person to blame here is yourself. Without a signed contract, you have no legal recourse: kick yourself, eat the loss, and never make such a stupid mistake again.)   Beyond that, as others have said, part of your responsibility as freelancer/sole trader/small business is to find yourself good customers and not hesitate to fire the bad ones. There is loads of good business advice out there. It’s up to you to educate yourself so you know what you’re doing and operate professionally, for your own sake and for your customers’ too. ... View more

You really need to provide Before and After example screenshots so we can see what you’re talking about.   That said, if you want a “®” symbol to appear at the end of the text, is there a reason your script can’t just append the Unicode character (U+00AE) to the string before it inserts it?   textFrame.contents = productName + "\u00AE"   Much, much simpler than putting it in a separate text frame which requires repositioning. ... View more

@Sergey Osokin: Looks like you have a suitable solution well under development so I’ll let you and OP get on with it. Cheers. ... View more

Wait. Logo generators are pretty rubbish now but it’s only a matter of time till someone who understands graphic design properly trains a GPT-3 network on everything from Saul Bass onwards and sets it loose on the world. For a lot of small businesses and sole traders who just want something to stick on their Etsy storefront and business cards, fast, cheap, and just good enough will do nicely, thankyouverymuch.   (You don’t even need an online generator if you already have Illustrator. Adobe’s stock library has a respectable selection of vector logo designs if OP is just looking for something to slap a company name into and apply an appropriate color scheme for the business. Less is more, KISS.) ... View more

“You have to understand how confusing is your request to us. Illustrator does provide all the creation tools at hand.”   ^^^ This 100%. As a tool, Illustrator is more than sufficient for creating logo artworks.   What Illustrator won’t do is design good logos. OP has to learn how do that for themselves. That means learning basic graphic design principles (typography, color theory, grid layout, etc); studying existing logos to understand what makes them good or bad; and then practice, practice, practice.   Since OP talks about “gradient, fillet, etc,” I can’t help but remember this horror, so will repeat just what I said there. Here’s a couple good logo design how-tos:   https://www.feelingpeaky.com/5-principles-of-logo-design   https://99designs.co.uk/blog/logo-branding/principles-of-logo-design   And here’s a good how-not-to, as understanding what makes a logo design bad is also important:   https://blog.hubspot.com/insiders/logo-design-tips ... View more

“This will require a nesting algorithm”   You may be overthinking it.   OP hasn’t said if they want the artboards to be automatically reordered or not. They may require the artboards to appear in the exact order listed in the CSV. Or the size and number of artboards may be small enough that they will all fit into a single AI document without rearrangement. Or perhaps OP prefers any overflow is moved to another document. All questions to ask when developing a production solution.   Here is a simple tiling algorithm which creates the artboards in the listed order. It assumes the ruler origin is already placed in the top-left corner of the document. I have hardcoded some artboard sizes for demonstration purposes; reading this data from a file is left as an exercise. (function () { var artboardSizes = [ // test data; sizes are in inches {w: 95, h: 10}, {w: 10, h: 43}, {w: 26, h: 31}, {w: 80, h: 36}, {w: 19, h: 12}, {w: 30, h: 10}, ]; function in2pt(n) { return n * 72; } var doc = app.activeDocument; var oldArtboard = doc.artboards[0]; // the original artboard will be discarded later var MAX_WIDTH = in2pt(224); // this assumes ruler origin is near top-left of document var PAD_X = in2pt(0.1), PAD_Y = in2pt(0.1); // spacing between artboards var x = 0, y = 0, rowHeight = 0; for (var i = 0; i < artboardSizes.length; i++) { var size = artboardSizes[i]; var w = in2pt(size.w), h = in2pt(size.h); if (x + w > MAX_WIDTH) { // will artboard fit on current row? if not, start a new row x = 0; y = y - rowHeight - PAD_Y; rowHeight = 0; } rowHeight = Math.max(rowHeight, h); doc.artboards.add([x, y, x + w, y - h]); // this will throw if an artboard is too large x += w + PAD_X; } oldArtboard.remove(); })();   `MAX_WIDTH` is the distance from the origin to the right side of the document, which determines when to start a new row. The script just throws an error if an artboard is too wide to fit the document or falls off the bottom, but those cases can also be handled if needed.   If reordering the artboards to fit more efficiently, quick and crude is to sort the dimensions by height: artboardSizes.sort(function (a, b) { return a.h < b.h; });   It is not an optimal fit but may be “good enough”. Smarter packing algorithms can be found online and adapted to run on Illustrator’s ancient ExtendScript (ES3, aka JavaScript 1999) if OP requires a tighter fit. ... View more

Carlos has already mentioned Variable Data, which is sufficient for basic layours and requires no special skills to set up, so check that out first to see if it provides the features you need.   If you require more complex automation (resizing and repositioning text, applying color schemes, adding and removing optional elements, etc) you will need a scripted solution.   It is difficult to offer recommendations without additional details: number of existing templates and how often you add new ones, whether the editable elements are the same across all templates or can vary, your text styling and fitting rules, how colors are specified, and so on. It may help us if you can post a few screenshots of example templates, Excel spreadsheets, and finished artworks.   If your requirements are straightforward and identical across all templates, a bespoke JavaScript coded specifically to handle that design may be appropriate. If you need a flexible solution that can handle complex, varied designs and evolving requirements, I have an advanced automation engine that will smash it (demo attached). DM me if you wish to discuss further. ... View more

Are you asking how to draw that table as an artworker? Or how to populate that table with different names and times using automation? ... View more

Correcting myself: If you manually select a clipping path plus the placed/raster item it clips, it does appear in `selection` as a single GroupItem. (AI is smart enough to recognize you want them treated together. It’s when you select non-clipping groups that `selection` unhelpfully gives you all the individual paths instead.)   With that in mind, what you want is to set the clipping path’s width and height to your desired dimensions, then proportionally scale and reposition the image so that it completely fills that clipping path with any excess width/height cropped. The following code should handle that one particular use-case:   var doc = app.activeDocument; var artboard = doc.artboards[0]; var rect = artboard.artboardRect; var artboardWidth = rect[2] - rect[0]; var sel = doc.selection; function calculateClippingPathHeight(width) { return width * 0.8; // use whatever calculation you want here } function recenterItemInBounds(item, bounds) { var p = item.position; p[0] = bounds[0] - (item.width - (bounds[2] - bounds[0])) / 2; p[1] = bounds[1] + (item.height - (bounds[1] - bounds[3])) / 2; item.position = p; } // assume a clipping path with a single placed/raster item behind it if (sel.length === 1 && sel[0].typename === 'GroupItem' && sel[0].pageItems.length === 2 && sel[0].pageItems[0].clipping) { var group = sel[0]; var clip = group.pageItems[0]; var image = group.pageItems[1]; // set the desired width and height of the clipping path clip.width = artboardWidth; clip.height = calculateClippingPathHeight(clip.width); // calculate proportional scale factor for image so that it fills the clipping path var scale = Math.max(clip.width / image.width, clip.height / image.height) * 100; image.resize(scale, scale); // recenter the image in the clipping path recenterItemInBounds(image, clip.geometricBounds); // recenter the group on the artboard recenterItemInBounds(group, artboard.artboardRect); } else { alert("Selection is not a clipped image."); }    Developing a more general-purpose script which can process any number and combination of selected items, position items according to different rules, etc is left as an exercise to the reader. ... View more

If you want to create GUI panels in Illustrator, you will have to use CEP to build them:   https://github.com/Adobe-CEP   Bit of a pain now that PS and ID both have shiny new UXP support. With CEP and ExtendScript you have to write completely separate scripts to control the GUI panel vs manipulate the DOM, and then figure out how to get them to talk to each other across two separate JavaScript engines with two decades of differences between them! UXP adds its own complexities but at least everything is done a single modern JavaScript (hence the “Unified”). Perhaps MAX 2023 will finally bring UXP to AI as well.   However, if all you want is an easy way to launch your ExtendScripts by clicking on a list of script names in a palette, I suggest you rummage around online first to see if someone’s already made a CEP panel for this. ... View more

If you are are familiar with InDesign you may be confusing yourself. Illustrator has no concept of “frames” as ID does. AI only understands paths and placed objects such as bitmaps. (Even AI’s “text frames” aren’t really “frames”: they’re just plain old paths with text flowed into them.)   [ETA: this next paragraph is incorrect; see reply below]   Thus if you select a group item containing a raster image with a clipping path above it, those will appear on the `selection` property as 2 separate items, not 1. It would be great if you could write `selection.groupItems[0]` and get the group that way, but AI’s ExtendScript is not that helpful. Since femkeblanco’s example code only resizes the first selected item (in this case the clipping path only), your “cropped image frame” in AI doesn’t resize as it would in ID.   What you really want is to find the GroupItem that contains both items and resize that. This is doable : every PageItem has a `container` property so you can recurse up through that to discover what group(s) contain each item. You can then figure out which of these containing groups (if any) is common to them all.   If you know the selection will always be a raster image with a grouped clipping path, it’s simple enough: just get their immediate container. OTOH, if you want a solution that will work reliably for any number of selected items, including items in deeply nested groups and/or in unrelated groups or not grouped at all, there’s a bit more algorithmic complexity involved.   An alternate approach is to use `PageItem.resize(…)`, making sure to use the `Transform.DOCUMENTORIGIN` option. That way, you can resize each item in turn while preserving their positioning relative to each other. This will work regardless of whether the items are grouped together or not. Once you’ve resized them all, you will have to calculate the distance to move each item to get them all to where you want them on the page. Not terribly complex to code, just a bit tedious and inelegant.   …   Couple other thoughts:   Another reason for wanting to use the `PageItem.resize(…)` method is that it can also scale stroke weights, fill patterns, and other attributes to preserve their proportions, whereas setting the width and height directly does not. Do whatever math you want to calculate the horizontal and vertical percentages (100.0 = 100%) for scaling the object to the size you want. Be aware that some attributes—e.g. round corners and other live effects—will not be scaled by either method unless you expand their appearances first.   TBH I couldn’t understand the logic being used to calculate the object’s height. If your intention is to scale both axes by the same amount, which I suspect is your goal if you’re fitting items to artboard, you need to rethink your math.   (If your intention is to scale the object’s horizontal and vertical axes by different amounts to deliberately distort it, you may want to outline its path strokes too before you resize so those strokes are likewise distorted.)   If you are still struggling for a solution, it will help if you post Before and After screenshots of what it is you are trying to achieve, plus a screenshot of your script’s incorrect result for comparison. ... View more

You are not going to find a trivial solution as this is not a trivial problem. There are too many complex factors determining if one object completely occludes another or not: [irregular] path shape, opacity, appearances, live brushes/patterns/filters, translucent bitmaps, third-party plugins, hidden object/container/layer, overprint. You certainly can’t do it in ExtendScript as it doesn’t have access to all these attributes.   Any naive solution for detecting occluded objects will inevitably yield naive results. While failure to detect a hidden object is no biggie, incorrectly identifying a visible object as hidden is a very bad outcome if your plan is to delete those objects from the document.   Loic suggested professional PDF preflight software which is priced accordingly. If this is something you must do, you should trial that to determine if it meets your needs.   The only test for determining an object’s occlusion I would contemplate trusting is to compare how the document prints. Export two sets of separations at suitably high DPI, one with the object present and the other without. If the bitmap data is identical for both, it’s probably safe enough to toss the object. That will be painfully tedious, even with basic optimizations (e.g. skip all objects that are obviously visible, rasterize just the area containing the object being tested), and is not a novice job to code.   In any case, there is a much simpler question to ask: Why do you want to remove occluded objects in the first place? Unless there’s some very good technical reason for doing so—e.g. you need to produce compact efficient SVG/PDF files from messy documents containing many obscured paths—then your quickest, cheapest, most foolproof solution is just to leave well alone and do nothing at all. Occluded objects won’t affect the image’s final on-screen/in-print appearance so while they are deadweight they are not the end of the world.   And if you do need to do it for good technical reason then unless you have large numbers of documents to process then you’ll be quickest and cheapest to perform the job manually, either doing it yourself or outsourcing to a cheap artworking provider. Just because a task may be automated doesn’t mean automation is the most cost-effective route; there is much still to be said for old-school computing. ... View more

This question is meaningless.   .ai, .pdf, .jpg are image file formats. Base64 is not an image file format. It is a general method for encoding data, like ROT13 or ZIP.   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base64   Is your goal to save your .ai artwork to a .jpg file, then encode that .jpg file’s contents as Base64 data? To export as JPEG, use AI’s ‘export’ command.   To convert the bitmap image to Base64-encoded text in macOS’s Terminal.app:   base64 your-image.jpg > your-image-base64.txt   I expect Windows’ PowerShell has something equivalent.   ... View more

I assume you’ve already looked around to see if there’s a Photoshop mosaic filter that can take a predefined mosaic pattern, and didn’t find one. Or there is some reason why your random mosaic pattern has to be rendered as paths, not pixels.   If you want to approach it as an Illustrator problem, Object > Create Object Mosaic… will convert your source bitmap image to a grid mosaic. Make the grid cells a good bit smaller than your random mosaic’s tiles; maybe 9-to-1 or 16-to-1. You can then use a script to iterate through each path in your random mosaic, find the grid tile(s) it overlaps, and set its fill color to a color taken from those. From what you describe I suspect that will be the easiest solution to implement as the whole job can be done without going outside of AI. Crude, but you say the color doesn’t need to be an exact average so probably good enough.   The alternative would be to use a bit of bitmap image processing to determine your tile colors. For each random path in your mosaic, export a black/white mask image of the same dimensions as your bitmap (you can script that task in AI), then (the math-y image processing part) apply that mask to the source bitmap to discard all pixels except those it overlaps, then average those remaining pixels’ color values to get the color to apply to that mosaic tile back in AI. This will give you the exact average color, though is obviously more work. I would suggest rummaging on npm and/or processing.org to see if you can find a suitable bitmap processing library to do the gruntwork for you: the algorithm is trivial enough on paper; it’s reading the bitmap image file formats into arrays of numbers to work on that’s probably the chore. ... View more

Your problem is that if Illustrator’s ExtendScript API doesn’t provide a `doScript` function for running AppleScripts, and it doesn’t provide a `system()` like call for running shell scripts, and it doesn’t even provide a `Socket` object, then I think you’re about out of luck.   You might consider executing your .jsx scripts from AppleScript using `do javascript jsxScript with arguments {arg1, arg2, …}`, allowing AppleScript to take care of the bits you don’t want to do yourself. Or you might write a CEP panel, and have that execute both.   Personally I’d just grimace and bear it for now, use `File` and `Folder` despite their limitations, and bide your time until UXP makes its public appearance for AI. UXP is built on Node.js, which is way more capable than moldy ExtendScript, in large part due to its massive third-party library support (albeit sometimes of dubious quality). That includes far better standard libraries for accessing the filesystem, and 3rd-party libraries for interacting with AppleScriptable apps directly and just about everything else.   Fingers crossed we all start migrating off ancient, creaky ExtendScript onto modern Node.js sooner rather than later. Let’s see what MAX 2022 brings in October, I guess. ... View more

Don’t use AppleScript to manipulate files. There’s no need. ExtendScript’s built-in File and Folder objects can do that.   https://extendscript.docsforadobe.dev/ ... View more

“None of these examples is a "professional logo"”   Agreed. Those are absolutely shocking.†   @MARIE-LOUISE25797951qdth: Here’s a couple good logo design how-tos:   https://www.feelingpeaky.com/5-principles-of-logo-design   https://99designs.co.uk/blog/logo-branding/principles-of-logo-design   And here’s a good how-not-to, as understanding what makes a logo design bad is also important:   https://blog.hubspot.com/insiders/logo-design-tips   …   Also, please don’t spam forum tags. Your post is relevant to Draw and design, How to,  and possibly Tools, and Type. It has absolutely nothing to do with Bug, Feature request, Import and export, Performance, Print and publish, Scripting, SDK, Sync and storage, Third party plugins. (The rest of us already have C++ and ES3 to make our eyes bleed; we don’t need bad art as well.)   --   † Except maybe in Vegas, where “absolutely shocking” is the de facto standard and Paul Rand would get laughed out of the room.   ... View more

@CarlosCantoNah, was definitely critical caffeine deficiency on my part: the diagrams made it quite clear what OP wanted to identify.   @Ste25643049jr32Fingers crossed the Astute plugin fits your needs. If not, you’re welcome to post back here/DM for brainstorming round #2. It’s a pity Adobe’s scripting APIs don’t provide insight into where Bezier curves lie, as these kinds of questions are not uncommon—detecting if/where two paths intersect is another—and Illustrator has already done all the hard math itself. Still, a spot of creative thinking may provide a solution that is “good enough” (even if it is held together with two bobby pins and a wad of gum). ... View more

Sorry, I misread the question. tromboniator interpreted it correctly. That’s what happens when I post before coffee. You don’t want to find thin paths, you want to find narrow gaps between paths.   I think Mylenium is right: you would have to do the same math that Illustrator performs when it draws Bezier curves to screen. Calculate the coordinates of points along each line, e.g. every 1mm. That math is non-trivial, but someone experienced in implementing 2D vector graphics could tell you how, or even provide you with code. They might want to charge you, of course.   Having plotted these points, compare those points against points on other nearby lines to see if they are less than a minimum distance. Measuring distance between points at least is simple Pythagoras; any kid can do that. Although if you have a lot of lines to compare to each other, you’ll want to some crude bounds checks beforehand so you aren’t wasting time comparing lines that are obviously distant to each other. (A naive algorithm that compares every point to every other point has quadratic efficiency, so will get unspeakably slow very fast.)   …   There is a “cheat” you can use for that first part which bypasses the need to do Bezier math. Duplicate all your paths (so you don’t mess up your original artwork), then tell AI to add additional points to each path (Object > Path > Add Anchor Points). There isn’t, AFAIK, an option to specify a fixed distance between each path so figuring how to get a reasonable distribution is left as an exercise for readers. Once you’ve got enough points, get their coordinates along each path to perform the minimum distance tests as described above and annotate the file to indicate where points are too close, and finally delete the mangled artwork to leave the original.   If you know JavaScript then I expect you can figure out the code for this. If not, perhaps someone here will do you the solid. (I could write it for you but would have to charge you for my time as it’s not a 2-minute job like my lovely, simple, wrong AppleScript.)   …   Lastly, if the Astute Graphics plugin Mylenium linked to can provide the functionality you need, just go pay for that. Problem solved, and quicker and cheaper than paying for a custom solution.   ... View more

Trivial in AppleScript:   tell application "Adobe Illustrator" tell document 1 set selection to every path item whose stroke width < 1.0 -- width in pts end tell end tell   In JSX you’ll have to loop through the paths yourself:   var doc = app.activeDocument; doc.selection = []; // clear any existing selection for (var i = 0; i < doc.pathItems.length; i++) { var p = doc.pathItems[i]; p.selected = p.strokeWidth < 1.0; // stroke width in pts }   Mind that page items have to be unlocked and visible in order to select them.   Converting from mm to points (which is what AI’s scripting APIs use) is left as an exercise to the reader. ... View more

Absolutely. Sounds like it should be 100% automatable, which I imagine would save you significant time. Are you looking for someone to build a solution for you, or is this something you want to learn how to do for yourself?   As to whether you could do it using Variable Data + Appearances alone, that really depends on how your final artworks need to be constructed. VD allows you to (e.g.) label a live text frame to match the label of a column in a spreadsheet, so that when the spreadsheet data is imported into AI its text flows into the text frame. The text frame can be pre-styled using live Appearances effects—apply a fill color to the text, add a outline stroke around the text offset by some millimeters to serve as cutter path, etc—so that when the text flows in it takes those styles automatically.   VD is good for simple artworks that have a fixed layout: you don’t need to know any scripting to use it, and it has the advantage that your artwork file remains live so if you amend your source text you can reflow it into the artwork at any time. That said, its capabilities are limited. For more complex artwork manipulations—e.g. unifying the cutter path outlines around each letter into a single path—you’ll likely have to use Actions/JavaScript, and if there’s much of that needed then it’s probably simpler to do the lot in one script.   Also, consider whether you want a one-off solution that works for your existing templates as long as they never change, or if you want something more open-ended that lets you add new designs in future.   If you want more specific advice you’ll need to provide more detailed requirements, including Before and After of your artworks and a sample data file (I’m guessing your source text is an .xlsx file as lots of folk like using Excel), and any technical notes on how complex elements such as cutter paths need to be built.   If you’re looking for a quote you’re welcome to DM me.   HTH ... View more

ExtendScript is JavaScript ES3 (ECMAScript 3), which has no "classes".  Correct. To clarify further: ES6 doesn’t have classes either. What ES6 adds is some syntactic sugar over ES3’s original prototypal object-oriented programming model. This is really a marketing move, to make JS look more attractive to traditional OO developers. Underneath, ES6 still has all the original JS semantics and behaviors, including various gotchas to trip unwary “class” syntax users, e.g. dynamic `this` binding (which is NOT the same thing as `self` in Smalltalk and Python or `this` in Java). Therefore it’s a really good idea to understand how JS’s OO model actually works, regardless of which syntax you use in your scripts. This looks like a good intro:   https://alistapart.com/article/prototypal-object-oriented-programming-using-javascript/   Short version: JS’s `new` keyword, when applied to a function call, modifies the function’s behavior so that, instead of evaluating the function body and returning that code’s result, a brand new empty Object is created and temporarily bound to `this`. The function body can then attach functions and other values to the object, and when the function returns the result is this new object.   A very simple, completely uniform system that gives you all the power of class-based OOP with none of the complexities and inconsistencies of the traditional two-tier class vs instance approach. Everything is an instance (object); no need for separate classes. It does have a certain number of warts, such as `new` appearing at the call site instead of the function definition, attaching prototypes to create an inheritance chain being a bit of a fiddle, and `this` not behaving as you’d expect. But those are JS design issues, not prototypal OOP design issues; and hey, it wouldn’t be JavaScript if it weren’t warty as a toad.   (ES6’s “class” syntax addresses some of those warts—e.g. inheritance chains are now easy to declare using the `extends` keyword—while masking others—`this` will still catch uwary users out, even moreso than before. So it goes.)   …   p.s. FWIW, while ExtendScript is forever stuck on ancient mouldering ES3, Adobe’s new UXP builds on modern Node.js so will bring all the benefits of that highly active platform: ES6 (V8), npm, and tons of developer tools and other resources. Adobe are currently phasing in UXP support for PS; no word yet on when it will land in AI and ID, but I expect sometime over the next few years. Should be interesting. Adobe’s Tech Blog is worth keeping an eye on:   https://medium.com/adobetech   p.p.s. Vassily Hall has also done work creating a VSCode project template using polyfilled TypeScript for ExtendScript development, which you can find on his GitHub:   https://github.com/Silly-V ... View more

It is unclear what OP means by “panels” (though I assume some sort of AI artwork/template). However it is clear they are talking about using AI as back-end engine to a public webservice, which AI’s desktop licensing terms explicitly forbids. Further discussion of using AI in this way is therefore academic, until such time as Adobe finishes putting its graphics app engines into its Cloud with solid UXP APIs and SaaS/IaaS licensing. Maybe in another 3–4 years; they still have a way to go.   https://blog.adobe.com/en/publish/2021/10/26/creative-cloud-canvas-spaces-ps-ai-in-browser   AFAIK there is only one Adobe graphics app currently licensed for this type of use: InDesign Server; currently used to drive CHILI publish amongst other third-party products. I believe a single IDS license runs five figures per-year, which may not be in the price range that OP is hoping for. There are various third-party FOSS vector drawing applications, numerous free and commercial PDF and SVG rendering engines, HTML5 canvas, and no doubt lots of other possibilities. OP is welcome to look around while he works out his business plan. For anything non-trivial, mid-five figures is probably a good R&D budget just to get started; assume six figures to build into successful commercial product. Ergo, it’s a lot cheaper to do your due diligence before you jump in both feet first. ... View more

Assuming that shear is to be calculated as whatever is left after deducting “rotation from horizontal” (the result of the first equation), you’ll want to start with the difference between mValueB and mValueC. So your second equation is already wrong. Beyond that, as I said first time around, you’re talking math. Folks here are typically working artists whose high-school math, if they ever had much, is probably shot. As @femkeblanco says, go ask a geometer instead. ... View more

You don’t sound like an Illustrator artist, which suggests to me that editing this artwork file lies outside your job description and/or above your pay grade. Without knowing what kind of artwork it is or the purpose for which it’s created, here is some general advice. First, a question:   1. Is this a small business which you own, and you’ve commissioned an artist to create an artwork for you?   2. Are you just an employee in someone else’s company, with managers above you?   If it’s #1: talk to your artist. Because it sounds like either you’ve not briefed them sufficiently well on your requirements (e.g. you need the artwork in MS Word format with X/Y/Z sections text editable by you) or, if you did, that they’ve not followed your requirements correctly (they delivered a finished print-ready artwork, and outlined the text to avoid any “missing font” problems when printed). A good artist understands that customers are not experts in design and print (that’s why you’re hiring them!), and will ask all the right questions to pin down requirements during the briefing process; and if a few issues still slip through then best to identify and correct as quickly as possible.   Also, a contract for an artwork will typically allow for several rounds of revisions, where the artist sends you a draft artwork to review and request any alterations; then they make those changes and send a new draft; and rinse and repeat until you’re happy with the final artwork (or need to pay for additional revisions). So while the artist may send you a non-editable copy to preview, they will still have the original editable files to work on themselves.   If it’s #2: punt the problem up to your manager. That’s what good managers are there for: handling problems that are outside your job description and above your pay grade. Say you do not have the necessary training to edit the artwork file yourself, and ask if they want you to forward the list of revisions back to the designer to action.   Again, it may be that the designer was supposed to supply the artwork in a format editable by non-artworkers, e.g. a Word template. Or perhaps your manager assigned that work to you not appreciating that it requires skills which you do not have. We have no way of knowing and it sounds like neither do you, so again punt it up to someone whose responsibility it is to know for them to sort out.   (And if you have a bad manager? Absolutely CYA! Put everything in writing so that if they force you to make changes despite not knowing how, you’ve a hard paper trail to pin the responsibility for the resultant mess firmly onto them, not on you. And polish your CV so you can go find a job that’s not run by turnips.) ... View more

It’s the same command, named `scale` in AS and `resize` in JS. The parameter you want is `line scale`:   tell application "Adobe Illustrator" tell document 1 scale path item 1 horizontal scale 200 vertical scale 200 line scale 200 end tell end tell   ... View more

Illustrator doesn’t have image “frames” in the InDesign sense. Create a new path with the same size and position as the image’s bounds, and stroke that. ... View more