Compound Shape belongs to the PluginItem type because it is created in Illustrator by the Pathfinder plug-in. The PluginItem’s position attribute sets the position of the top left corner of the object, just like the similar attribute for other objects. An alternative method of setting the position is to use…

The selectObjectsOnActiveArtboard method in Adobe Illustrator selects objects on the active artboard that are at least partially within its area. This automatically clears the current selection of objects. But what if you add your own clearing of the app.selection array to the code before calling the method? Let’s take the…

In the Illustrator object model, the ImageColorSpace constant is used to set the color space of a bitmap image or export file. Adobe releases the “Illustrator Scripting Guide.pdf” with every major update to Illustrator, with a repeated typo in the table of color space values. Adobe developers have set ImageColorSpace.GrayScale to export in grayscale with two capital letters. The author of this guide printed it as ImageColorSpace.Grayscale. Since the values are case-sensitive, scripts with lowercase “s” will generate an “Error 1320: Invalid enumeration value”.

In the Illustrator object model, the exportFile() method exports a file in a specified format with options. The three arguments are specified inside the parentheses of the method. For example, let’s export the active artboard of a document to PNG. var doc = app.activeDocument; var opts = new ExportOptionsPNG24(); opts.artBoardClipping = true; var…

The app.activeDocument.groupItems collection contains a list of all document groups. If the script duplicates an existing group or creates a new one using the groupItems.add() method, the contents of the GroupItems collection are not updated: the number remains the same as before you ran the script, you cannot access the…

Ways to quickly run scripts in Illustrator that are not installed in the scripts folder: Menu File → Scripts → Other Script… The drag-and-drop method is to drag a script file from a folder in Explorer (Windows) or Finder (Mac) to an Adobe Illustrator window. For future examples, let’s refresh…

A Compound Shape is an editable object consisting of two or more elements. It is created from the Pathfinder panel menu → Make Compound Shape or by applying a Boolean operation with the Alt key. A Compound Shape looks like a group, but has no similar properties and methods for…

Adobe Illustrator CC (Creative Cloud) scripts on Windows computers, have a “flickering” problem when you close the dialog box. Visually, it looks like double-clicking Alt+Tab when the previous program window appears in the foreground. In Adobe Illustrator CS6, there is no this problem in the tests. The reason for the…

In the Illustrator Preferences or current document settings (Document Setup → Units) you set the ruler units. Document units do not affect global preferences, but changing global units will change document settings. In the DOM, the activeDocument.rulerUnits property returns the current units from the list: RulerUnits.Pixels, RulerUnits.Millimeters, and so on…