Is there any way to determine if anything is occupying a specific area of a page? Multiple people need to access the same document to save pieces of artwork to a file to be printed out as a template to produce hot stamps (dies).
I need to align various sizes of artwork (rectangles) in illustrator, on a page, until the page is full. So, I need to determine if any dies are on the page, and if so, place them in the right spot so they are next in line and not on top of another piece of art. I need to know where each die is located each time the script is run, as multiple people will run the script from different machines. If there’s a way to find out where they all are, I think I can figure out how to place the next one in line. BUT, if anyone has the code to do all of this, I will not only freak out with happiness, but be forever grateful for the knowledge.
you’ve to study the script dictionary of Illustrator using the script editor. It isn’t so trivial as one could expect. For a quick insight of the scripting capabilities of Illustrator, try to get the properties of your first/frontmost document and then, the properties of one of the pictures/boxes of your document. Read the output, proceed scripting.
You need to know the size of your images and the boundaries of your document, multiplied by the number of images. Then, to arrange these images-collected in a group- along a given position (left, left top). However, you need an afternoon to script a good portion of this script. This is valid for arranging items in a document. For the remote/network features, try the search function of mac scripter. Collect and merge from the examples you’ll find there.
Sorry for the little help i can give.
I think I’ve come up with something that will work. I ran a script first which attached a name property to the grouping of art, depending on its size and how many spaces it would take up on the template. 1 thru 4 are the sizes, divided by 16 available slots. Having that size information, I can then assign x,y coordinates to the 16 slots and arrange the artwork to the page by slot/size.
I have the x,y stuff, now I just need to work out the loop and IF/THEN statements that will correctly place the art each time the script is run…