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Delete Unused Text Variables

Community Beginner ,
Oct 25, 2020 Oct 25, 2020

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I am a home user of Adobe products and only started with Illustrator a month ago and do not have an indepth knowledge and am hoping someone can help me in a 'Talking to an idiot' way please:

I would like to create a set of information cards - I have created the data files in Excel and can import them into my Illustrator template document. So, halfway there 🙂 However, my template document has 6 points of information in a list - this is the maximum number of points I need within the set of cards. But, there are many cards with less than 6 points and when this happens the data from my template is showing - which is obviously no good - I need them to remain blank. Ive spent a while on Google and not found my answer - the closest to it this post and answer

  https://community.adobe.com/t5/indesign/delete-unused-text-variables/m-p/10516881?page=1 

 but this is for InDesign so not sure if it would work in illustrator and even if it did when would I apply the script? I think I know how to upload the script to Illustrator. Do I even need a script?

Fingers=crossed someone can help.

Helen

 

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Valorous Hero ,
Oct 26, 2020 Oct 26, 2020

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You can use visibility variables to hide a text box which doesn't need to be there. If you use some complicated grouping or layering, you can set the text-wrap property which can actually squish text upwards if a textbox is hidden.

For text-wrap technique you can take a look at this article here (https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/illustrator-variable-data-techniques-paragraph-push-down-vasily-hall/)

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Community Beginner ,
Oct 29, 2020 Oct 29, 2020

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Thanks Silly-V

I am still stuck on the visibility variable - I have obviously got something fundemental wrong and just can't see it for looking!?

 

So, I have created variables from my template which has the full quota of 6 crystals and their benefits - data set 1. I have set the visibility on Crystal_2 through to 6 as various sets use less than the maximum 6. BUT, when I do the data merge All of the original 6 crystals still show. So, I goto the layers for a data set with say only the 2 crystals and set the 'un-needed' crystals to be invisible - that works for that dataset BUT it also affects all the other data sets too 😞

 

This test set up just reuses the same crystals but in reality there are over 100 crystals and their benefits and loads of different crystal sets too - if I could crack this life will be much easier 🙂

The crystals and benefits in the data sets are chosen from a drop-down list - could this be part of the problem?

 

Here is the link to the images in the faint hope you, or someone else can see where I am going wrong.

https://photos.app.goo.gl/w2XaBXs1Qh41UmTB7

Once I can get the visibility cracked I shall work on the layout.

Helen

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Community Beginner ,
Nov 03, 2020 Nov 03, 2020

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YAY!!!!

Persistance paid off!!  By using this you tube tutorial https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=50WQPxTlVL0

I got my head around the visibility variable - which turns out to be easy!! I think I also confused the issue as my text fields were in various groups - so I have now ungrouped everything.

 

I am now using Silly-V's Variable Importer Script

https://github.com/Silly-V/Adobe-Illustrator/blob/master/Variable%20Importer/VariableImporter.jsx

Because despite Illustrtor 2021 having the Variable option that works with CSV files now it is still not possible to automatically import/asign the dataset names which is a right pain - Thanks to Silly-V and his script this option is available 🙂

So, now my task is to work out how to create the correct layout for each data set. I tried running batch actions but that didn't work. I shall now try the text-wrap method as suggested by Silly-V above.

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Valorous Hero ,
Nov 04, 2020 Nov 04, 2020

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Yea, this may be tricky and frustrating, but it's possible to create workarounds using Text Wrap in Illustrator. Sometimes Illustrator does not properly adjust rendering and you may have to wrap some items in extra groups.

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