First-time poster here. Sorry if I’m placing this in the wrong place – I’m sure someone’ll let me know if I am.
First, I’m surprised that I didn’t find an Adobe Illustrator scripting repository, as there is for InDesign. So my first request is to explore the possibility of creating one.
Next, I’ve got a couple of suggestions for AICS scripts which are badly needed by graphic designers like me. One is a Collect for Output script for Adobe Illustrator that includes font collection. I’ve been searching high and low and everyone out there is wondering who is going to fill this badly needed void. I’m aware that there’s a commercial application out there called Art Files, which does a good job, but nothing open source (and therefore nothing learned by a scripting noobie like me). I’ve fooled around with adapting a couple of scripts that, combined, might work, but my skills aren’t up to the task. I’ll describe my ideas at the risk of you power-scripters out there thinking me foolish.
By default, Illustrator installs a bunch of nice scripts. One of them is Collect for Output, which does almost everything needed except collect the fonts. Another is Analyze Document Fonts, which generates a list of fonts in a given Illustrator doc. I was thinking that if this fontlist was handed off to the Finder, a scripter up to the task could get the Finder to copy those fonts into a folder, no? In fact, I think Automator has something close to that last piece. It’s stringing them together that’s beyond a lowly designer like me.
The other one we in the graphics field badly need would be a script to downsize placed images in an Illustrator doc to a user-defined pixel-per-inch value, stash them in a folder named “downsized images” or somesuch, append the name with a ppi value, and then relink them in a copy of the Illustrator doc. In addition, I’ve noticed quite a few folks are asking for a script that would extract embedded images in Illustrator, and possibly then perform the same downsizing and relinking process.
Finally, if the two scripts described above were combined into one master Collect script with user-definable preferences for the various options, it would result in a Master go-to script of incredible value to the graphics community.
Food for thought? Or maybe these already exist but my search didn’t uncover them? Let me know. Thanks!
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