I, ve got 670 business names in an excell spreadsheet that I need to format to a 1’H x 4.5" wide area, the point size can be no larger than 16 pt, 100% kerning, Century schoolbook font, all caps,. Each of these names need to be placed at a specific place on a letter size page. I was thinking of making like a 25 page tilled document, So I can export from Ill CS2 to a multipage PDF. I dont even know where to start automating this process. Beginer at scripting! Any guidence would be much appreciated
There are a number of ways to do this. I would go with InDesign if you can or Quark which are more suited to multi-page documents. If you have to go with Illustrator then I would first look into the variable data functions that they added to the program, it might very helpfull though I have only taken a quick look at it. Using this might even make the AppleScript unneccessary. You can defianatly get to work with Illustrator and Excell though and it shouldnt take too much work.
Thanks for the reply! I kinda need to stay within Illustrator so I can Expot the doc as an eps, keeping 20 images on the document. Hmmmmm.
The next thing I would do is look at how you are going to use the data. Not being a big user of Excell, I would export a tab delimited file and process that file in AppleScript. A lot what you need to do to get it to work depends on the format of the data and how you are going to deal with it in Illustrator. I would probably build an Illustrator template file that a script could open, enter the data into the appropriate text “block” in the template and save to a new name then move on to the next file. Again there might be a more effeicient way to do this using Illustrator’s variable objects.
Ok so I get how to make the variable text string in illustrator. But how do format the data to be entered. Is it like a mail merge with \Name\name. How do I create this xml file or text file.
There were sample files and scripts for creating and loading Illustrator variables on the Illus. 10 CD. You are looking for “Datasets from a Text File”, buried down in this folder:
Illus Extras:Scripting:Sample Scripts:AppleScript:Datasets:Datasets from Text File:
Interesting… So the script on the ill 10 disk creates the xml file from the text doc. I wonder how I would add text formatting to this (parameters like text string can be no wider than x) Thanks everyone for the replies. You learn something new every day