Your first Illustrator script

Your first Illustrator script

The traditional first project in any programming language is displaying the message “Hello World!” In this example, you create a new Illustrator document, then add a text frame containing this message. Follow these steps:

In a default Mac OS installation, Script Editor is in /Applications/AppleScript/Script Editor/.

If you cannot find the Script Editor application, you must reinstall it from your Mac OS system CD.

1. Open Script Editor.
2. Enter the following script:

   --Send the following commands to Illustrator
   tell application "Adobe Illustrator"
   
   --Create a new document
   set docRef to make new document
   
   --Create a new text frame with the string "Hello World"
   set textRef to make new text frame in docRef
   with properties { contents: "Hello World!", position:{200, 200} }
   
   end tell

3. In the Script Editor toolbar, click Run.

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Adding features to “Hello World”

Next, we create a new script that makes changes to the Illustrator document you created with your first script. Our second script demonstrates how to:

• Get the active document.
• Get the width of the active document.
• Resize the text frame to match the document’s width.

If you already closed the Illustrator document, run your first script again to create a new document.

Follow these steps:

1. In Script Editor, choose File > New to create a new script.
2. Enter the following code:

   tell application "Adobe Illustrator"
   
   -- current document is always the active document
   set docRef to the current document
   set docWidth to the width of docRef
   
   -- resize the text frame to match the page width
   set width of text frame 1 of docRef to docWidth
   
   -- alternatively, one can reference the item directly, as follows:
   set width of text frame 1 of current document to docWidth
   
   end tell

3. Run the script.