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.

---

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.