You can purge it with the SDK for sure, I've done it. From AIUndo.h: /** Forgets all redoable transactions. Any redos available at this point are forgotten. This decreases the available redo transactions to 0. @param document The document on which to perform the operation.. */ AIAPI AIErr (*ForgetRedos) ( AIDocumentHandle document ); /** Forgets all future transactions and commits all current and past transactions. Post this the transaction queue is empty. */ AIAPI AIErr (*ClearHistory) ( AIDocumentHandle document );   ... View more

I've never used that function, but my guess is that you can't specify nullptr for the prepArt parameter. Usually it wants some combination like 'kPlaceInsideOnTop' and a layer's group handle or 'kPlaceAbove' and a piece of art. It's possible it doesn't need it -- not super clear from the function description. I've never used `kPlaceDefault` so maybe that works fine with a null prepArt.   You should capture the error value -- it can include helpful information. I won't look like it, but the value can often be translated into a useful message. ... View more

I'm not sure what you want to do is possible. The user can switched colour models whenever they want; there's no way to disable CMYK. Best you could do would be to notice when they've picked CMYK and inform the user your plugin doesn't work with CMYK.   Removing CMYK colours from the document would just mean iterating the swatch list and deleting any colour that is a CMYK colour. Look in AISwatchList.h for functions to do that. Nothing stops the user from creating a CMYK colour manually though.   AIColor.h has functions for iterating all the colours in the document, if you need to insure that no art has a CMYK colour anywhere in the document. That's probably the best you can do. ... View more

You need to list the undefined symbols if there's any chance of helping you further -- post the full error message. Presumably you're missing some other .cpp files from the SDK, there are a bunch of the pattern IAI*.cpp in the illustratorapi folder. ... View more

My understanding is that the AIDrawArt suite is not really meant for public consumption. It has one or two methods in it that are useful (DrawHilite for example). I'm not saying it can't work, but I was sort of warned away from it years ago. If you need a thumbnail of some art there are other ways to do it. You can use the AIRasterizeSuite to render any artwork on the artboard and get the pixel data that way. If you don't want to do it for art that exists on the artboard, there are a few tricks for rendering it off screen that involve dictionaries but it's doable. ... View more

Our plugin is one of the reasons that functionality got added so we've been closely involved with it from the get go. That may have been left initially because there were a bunch of bugs and oversights that had to be remedied. I can say that we've been using this in production for over a year.  ... View more

An AIArtHandle is just a pointer to some object deep in AI; sometimes when art is changed on the artboard they decide that rather than alter it, it's easier to rebuild it (undo management may play a role here). It's almost certainly not worth investigating the whys & whens, but rather use some other method to track art.   I believe an AISafeArtHandle is guaranteed for the life of the art/document, but no further. I feel like I've had a similar experience to yours where the AISafeArtHandle wasn't as useful as I'd hoped, changing in some situations. I know of situations where you can feed an AIArtHandle to an API and it can crash Illustrator (if the art refered to was on an undo branch that is no longer accesible and thus has been pruned). I think AISafeArtHandle doesn't have that problem, so it's useful if you want to talk to the API and not crash, but it won't protect you from the behaviour you're seeing.   The true solution I think you're looking for is ai::uuid. We use it to track art & changes to art and I believe it is what you're really looking for -- see AIUUID.h. It works very similarly to AISafeArtHandle, so you should be able to switch one out for the other fairly easily.   This won't survive the document though; if you want to do that, you need to use AIUID.h (ain't the naming convention grand lol). ... View more

Oh, and when you receive the timer, you should probably disable it 🙂 ... View more

Looking at my code, it appears I neglected an important pair of lines!   error = sAITimer->SetTimerActive(timer, true); THROW_EXCEP_IF(error); I suspect that will solve your problem! Sorry I missed it! ... View more

I think I've run into the problem you're encountering, but I'm not 100% sure. Still, it's worth trying my workaround.   Basically -- at least in my case -- the problem was that I needed to let Illustrator take a beat before continuing with the save. The trick was tro create a zero duration timer, something like:   ai::int32 delay = 0; AITimerHandle timer = nullptr; auto error = sAITimer->AddTimer(pluginRef, "name_of_timeer", delay, &timer); // check errror   Then you just handle the timer callback and do your PDF SaveAs action there. A zero length timer is basically an 'OnIdle' event. If you had a slow enough computer, it might be twenty seconds later if that's how long it takes Illustrator to do whatever it needs to do in response to whatever you did before adding the timer, but it won't call the timer until it's done, which is what's important.   If you need the canvas to update in realtime, that's a different problem, but I don't think that's what you're talking about here. For that, you'd want to use AIDocumentSuite::RedrawDocument(), who's comment is:   Forces the current document to be redrawn. Illustrator automatically redraws the document when a plug-in returns, so this function is not usually needed.   Typically, I only use that if I'm in a dialog doing somethign on the artboard with annotations, and I don't even always need it. ... View more

There's a function, AIArtSuite::IsArtLayerGroup that returns true if the group is a layer, and false if it's just a group. ... View more