illustrator cs6 how to centre page items

Scripting Forums AppleScript | Mac OS X
#1

Hi
I’m trying to find some code to center items on a page, and not having much luck, the page items are placed and in a group, and selected, basically the group just needs to be centered, the page size will vary.

does any one have some code they can share or point me to please

cheers
Budgie

#2

Budgie. this is fairly simple stuff. Although Adobe’s logic is sometimes not. AI CS5 & CS6 work from Top/Left using negative values down. Here is a sample that may work for you. This one does not account for stroked items if you need that then it will need re-wording slightly.

tell application "Adobe Illustrator"
	tell the current document
		-- Get the first artboard
		set artB to the artboard rectangle of first artboard
		set artW to item 3 of artB
		set artH to -(item 4 of artB) -- This becomes integer don't know why
		
		-- Get the first group.
		set grpB to the geometric bounds of first group item
		set grpW to (item 3 of grpB) - (item 1 of grpB)
		set grpH to -((item 4 of grpB) - (item 2 of grpB))
		
		-- Move top/Left of your group to
		set position of the first group item to ¬
			{(artW - grpW) / 2, -((artH - grpH) / 2)}
	end tell
end tell
artH -- This becomes integer don't know why???????
artW -- This remains as real number

There does appear to be an issue with AppleScript and make a value negative not sure why.? Did I forget a proper way?

#3

thanks for helping here Mark67

the code centers everything on the x axis fine, but centers on the y axis in the middle of the item at the bottom of the page, not centered as expected?

#4

fixed it, cheers mark

#5

What did I have wrong.?

#6

hi Mark

I don’t think it was wrong, it just didn’t end up doing what was needed here. I’m slotting some illustrator actions into my ASOC app and for what ever reason it just would not center on the y axis, so to remedy this I changed this line

et artH to -(item 4 of artB) -- This becomes integer don't know why

to this

set artH to - (Page_H * mm)

where Page_H is pulled from a text fiels and mm is a property

property mm : 2.834645 as number

and i’m a happy camper,

I got hung up trying to use this type of set up, and wasnt getting the results I was after

set myMatrix to (get identity matrix)
			set myMatrix to concatenate translation matrix myMatrix delta x mymoveX delta y mymoveY

appreciate the help Mark
cheers

#7

Oh thats OK then. I have CS5 where Adobe turned the co-ords on its head as long as they have not u-turned a version later. There is also the issue where the co-ords differ with an opening a document and a new script created document and it can be confusing when testing debugging.