You've run into one of my pet peeves I've afraid -- the ADM doesn't support DIALOGEX. I believe you'll find that when 'nothing happens', that AI seems to be hung; if you hit escape though, I believe it will act like you just hit cancel on your missing dialog 🙂 At least, that's how it used to be. Fortunately the fix is fairly easy. Change DIALOGEX to DIALOG and remove the FONT line (entirely). Save, recompile and your dialog should show up. The only bad thing here is that EVERY TIME you use the Studio dialog editor, it's going to save it as DIALOGEX. I actually downloaded a regex utility and added a build step to do the DIALOGEX -> DIALOG changes. It's annoying, but it saves you big hassles, especially if you're tweaking dialogs a lot in Studio. ... View more

I *believe* if you copy the top level group (i.e. the actual group-that-is-really-a-layer) it will copy all the contents as well. If not though, I don't think it would be that big of a hassle; a simple recursive function carefully constructed should reassemble it exactly in the destination document. Thinking about it a little more, I wonder if copying the layer group and using a NULL relative art, with kPlaceArtOnTop (or whatever the non-relative one is) might just copy the layer perfectly. I'm not sure though, having never tried it. Looking at AILayer.h I see nothing about copying layers though, which actually leads me to believe what I've suggested would work. I think if it didn't they would have had to add a 'copy layer' method of some sort. ... View more

You do it just like you would copy art within a document; you just need the source art & destination art (for use with the relative positioning). Art handles are unique for the life of the documents to which they belong, so if you can get the two handles, it will copy them from one document to the other. ... View more

There are no constants for the Scripts sub-menu, so your best bet is to mimic what you'd do for the other menus and see if it works. I have a sinking feeling it *won't*, but I could be wrong. ... View more

I'm not sure if Scripts is covered, but you can request notifiers for most menu events. If you look at AIMenuCommandNotifiers.h you'll find a list of menu commands and a couple of examples of how you would construct a notifier to hear about those menus being clicked. That said, I don't know if anything in the Scripts sub-menu is covered. Most of File's items are though so maybe. It's fairly easy to try this and see though. ... View more

I'm not 100% sure about the details, but nothing stops you from connecting to a database, loading artwork details and creating symbols on the fly. Whether you can load those into their own library palette I'm not sure though. ... View more

I'm afraid this outside of my realm of expertise, having never tried this. Hopefully someone else can lend a hand here. ... View more

AIArt::IsArtLayerGroup() is what you want. It's not a subtype, but rather a flag -- though obviously you only kGroupArt would every have this set to true, I don't believe it hurts to ask any art if you wanted. ... View more

I just checked what I do and I'm doing pretty much the same thing. The only things I seem to do differently are these: 1) I clear the text range first with 'needtoBe.Remove()' 2) I assign the text using ASUnicode* not char*. You could try creating an ai::UnicodeString and using that. ... View more

Out of curiosity, have you managed to get one of the sample plugins up & running? If so, you might be better off taking the text example plugin and altering it to suit your needs. It can be a bit of a pain to bootstrap a plugin project from scratch, given the four or five pieces that just *need* to be there. Once you have something that compiles & builds, it's quite easy to alter it to suit your purposes. ... View more

The SDK has a JavaDocs style HTML reference now -- gone is the PDF function reference of old 🙂 There is an 'sdkdocs.tar.gz' in 'docs\references' that contains said HTML; expand that and you should be good to go (just find index.html to get started). If you're on Windows, I think there should be an index.chm you can also use, which is basically just a help file compiled off the HTML. ... View more

It sounds like you're not defining all the suite variables it needs. You should look at the sample text project and make sure you've got everything it does. This will probably mean including a couple of the helper headers in the ATE directory and making sure their macros get invoked. In a nutshell: the suite pointers IText.cpp uses are declared (header included) but not actually defined (some kind of .cpp). So it knows about the suite pointers, but it can't actually find details about them. ... View more

Are you including IText.cpp in your project? That's the most common mistake. ... View more

TextTest & Twirl in the samplecode have text & path examples respectively. Note that Twirl is doing some funky things with matrices, and only uses the path stuff to get & put the resultant lines, but that should give you an idea. Twirl.cpp's twirl_path() is what you want (there are two functions with the same name, so check them both) ... View more

This is a tricky one. If you've written a tool plugin, then you can receive events about mouse clicks & drags, but only if you tool is selected. If you want to receive this information at any given time, the answer is "you can't"...at least not with the API. It is possible to use the OS to catch mouse movement and clicks, though you'll have to catch the document opened notifier and hook into the right window to get the events. This is fairly straight forward to do with Spy++ on Windows (not sure what the equivalent on Mac is) in order to figure out what the window structure is, at least until CS3. After that, CS4 is a mess to figure out -- there are so many permutations of window organizations because you can have tabbed or not-tabbed or floating-tabbed documents. We actually hook into to this kind of functionality through the OS to get mouse movements and while it does work (and not terribly hard), we haven't got it 100% on CS4. ... View more

You'll need AIArt.h & AIPath.h to draw your line. Text -- assuming you're working with CS or later -- is handled using the ATE which you can access via ATESuites.h for suite pointers or IText.hpp for C++ objects that wrap the API. I should warn you that both the of the latter have a LOT of suites or objects in them; they're not divvied up nicely at all; just all lumped together. ... View more

It sounds like you'd need to create your own frame of reference to convert page units into whatever scale you want to use for your time lines. That's certainly possible; we do something similar to convert page units into cartographic units in MAPublisher. ... View more

I believe the problem you're having is that selection 'climbs upwards'. That is, if you select some art you also select it's parent, and its parent's parent, etc. So even if you just select a single path, you're also selecting the group that represents the layer. As such, you might be able to just ask the art if it's a layer group using AIArtSuite::IsArtLayerGroup() and ignore it if it is. I believe the rest will be an accurate depiction of what's selected, be it on art or many. Oh, and if the art you've selected is a compound path, that call will also include all the sub-component paths. If you don't want them, you can also ask each art in your set if it's part of a compound path by using AIArtSuite::GetArtUserAttr() with kArtPartOfCompound; I believe you can ignore anything that has that, though I'm not sure how it responds when you pass it the container kCompoundPathArt. Hope that helps! ... View more

There isn't an API for the chart tool unfortunately. I remember looking at that years ago and I think I recall noticing that it was storing it's data using the XML node stuff you can find in the AIXMLElement.h & AIXMLNameUtil.h headers. You can use that to look at the metadata node attached to a document. Like I said, this is all very vague even in my own head, but I thought I remembered seeing it stored in there; you might try creating a chart and then seeing if you can find the data you enter inside that metadata. If so, you might be able to reverse engineer out a way to automatically inject data into a chart. ... View more

I don't know if this will work, but you might try looking at GetArtForCurrentPathStyle() in AIMatchingArt.h. It's not quite what you're asking for, but you might be able to jimmy the current path style to get the matches you want, I'm not sure. Also, if comes to having to parse the whole tree there's a function in AIPathStyle.h called ObjectUsesAIColor() that will check the object & and it's associated style for the colour in question. That might help if it comes to that. ... View more

It's definitely available via a plugin, but I have no idea what's possible through the COM interface. My guess is that it's not, but maybe someone will chime in here and tell us different. ... View more

Get the SDK and start playing with the sample plug-ins. Asking for something as general as "how do I get started" is asking a little much from this forum 🙂 Try your hand at the SDK and come back to ask more specific questions as you run into them. Bear in mind that this isn't an Xcode forum either, though I'm sure there are places to get good help on that! ... View more

I'd look at recording what you want with actions. If that doesn't provide enough functionality, you can invoke actions from code -- as a last resort I think that would do what you need. ... View more

I don't think the AI SDK provides anything for this unfortunately; I think others have asked in the past. There really isn't anything that helps you read an AI file from outside of Illustrator in the SDK, which is what you'd need to generate the kind of previews you'd want. One can only assume that Adobe has that kind of separate library, but apparently they aren't sharing :( ... View more

Well, first of all you should be aware that PluginGroupArt has more than a few bugs in it. It's possible you're just running into one of those. We used PluginGroups in our application and currently its the chief source of headaches for us (which is a shame, because idea behind the suite is fantastic!) One thing you might try is registering your PluginGroup earlier -- I know we do it pretty much as soon as the plugin is loaded, rather than as late as the application started notifier. I'm not sure how much difference that will make though. One thing to make sure is that you're not using a local variable when setting the members of AIAddPluginData -- AI seems to take ownership of those char*. If you're just assigning the addresses of local buffers to that struct, you might be causing AI to use bad pointers and crash. ... View more

[Edit] Apparently I was wrong -- never mind! ... View more

Actually, a good way to test that last bit would be to record an export and then play it back with the dialog turned off. If that works, it's not a bug with Illustrator, but with how you're firing the event. AI uses their own SDK so if you don't see the bug when they use it, chances are they're not quite doing the same thing as you (but there is probably a way to make it work). Hope that helps! ... View more

I don't have a lot of experience with this kind of problem, but the first thing I'd check is the parameter block you're passing the action call. I don't know why it would matter if the dialog appeared or not, unless the export settings block wasn't being filled in with everything it needs? You might try recording an export you perform manually via the action palette, and then saving it to a file. You can open it up manually and compare it (even if it's a binary block) to what you're doing in code. You might spot something that way. I don't know what else to suggest though. It's unlikely to be an SDK bug, though it could be a bug in the action-aware part of the exporter. ... View more

I should also mention that that colour conversion code in the middle is because there used to be (still is?) a bug wherein if you used a colour model different from the document's to set the colour on objects (maybe just text, it's been a while since we had this problem) you'd get complaints the next time the document opened (nothing fatal). We got around it by simply automatically converting to the appropriate colour model. You may have to do the same even though you just want grayscale. Also note that if you want to set the colour of part of a text object, it's more complicated that what I've outlined above. That requires you to get to know TextRuns & GlyphRuns, etc. If you just want all of some text to be a certain colour though, the above code works great. ... View more

Sorry, I've been sick for a few days, just got back. Hopefully this will still be useful to you (or someone else!). First, I just want to mention that there's a suite for doing this kind of thing, the AIColorConversionSuite (AIColourConversion.h). I'd take a look at that; it might simply your conversion code. As for setting the text colour in CS on, here's the code we use in our application for setting text's stroke colour: ------------- snip -------------- ASSERT(sATEPaint); ASSERT(sAITextFrame); TextRangeRef textRangeRef = 0; // this code is inside an object that represents // text art, so it has a member that has the art // handle. This handle is retrieved using GetHandle() // so just replace 'GetHandle()' with your AIArtHandle // variable AIErr error = sAITextFrame->GetATETextRange(GetHandle(), &textRangeRef); THROW_EXCEP_IF(error); ATE::ITextRange textRange(textRangeRef); ATE::ICharFeatures charFeatures = textRange.GetUniqueLocalCharFeatures(); // colour is a pointer to our own colour object; its // a pointer so that a 'null' stroke can be set if (colour) { ATE::ApplicationPaintRef paintRef = 0; AIColor aiColour; // this is the colour model of the document, // which is either CMYK or RGB EColourModel model = CDocumentList::GetCurrentDocument().GetColourModel(); // we have classes, CRGBColour & CCMYKColour that automatically do // colour conversion for us -- they use the AIColorConversionSuite if (eColourModelRGB == model) { aiColour = (AIColor)(*colour); } else if (eColourModelCMYK == model) { aiColour = (AIColor)(CCMYKColour(*colour)); } error = sATEPaint->CreateATEApplicationPaint(&aiColour, &paintRef); THROW_EXCEP_IF(error); ATE::IApplicationPaint paint(paintRef); // obviously you'd use SetFillColor here if you wanted fill charFeatures.SetStrokeColor(paint); charFeatures.SetStroke(true); } else { charFeatures.SetStroke(false); } textRange.SetLocalCharFeatures(charFeatures); ------------- snip -------------- Note that THROW_EXCEP_IF is a macro of ours that throws an exception if error != kNoErr. ... View more