Scriptographer

February 16, 2002 9:24 PM

Scriptographer is an Adobe Illustrator plugin that allows usage of Javascript to extend the functionality of the program. Looks really interesting. Short on examples right now, but the documentation and whatnot is all there. [Note: Major dHTML usage on the page. No stupid window resizing and such, though.]
posted by Su (9 comments total)

Horrible, buggy site that doesn't let me look at the script examples (I get Forbidden Access errors).

but cool idea that I most definitely will play with.
posted by mkn at 9:56 PM on February 16, 2002

And here I just upgraded to version 10, so can't even play with this. Sigh.

Interesting idea. At first glance, though, it looks like you might be almost better off writing a script to output postscript directly; the programming effort would be pretty similar. But if they can extend this to take advantage of some of Illustrator's built-in capabilities, might be worth a go...
posted by ook at 10:10 PM on February 16, 2002

Hey, lookathat... I was just digging through the Illustrator CD (told you I just upgraded; the disc arrived this morning) and found a 500-page manual on controlling Illustrator with Applescript or Visual Basic; built right in to the program. Hardly seems worthwhile to port it to javascript as well, does it?
posted by ook at 10:44 PM on February 16, 2002

Hey, lookathat... I was just digging through the Illustrator CD (told you I just upgraded; the disc arrived this morning) and found a 500-page manual on controlling Illustrator with Applescript, Visual Basic, or JavaScript -- this capability is built right in to the program. So I'm a bit confused as to what this website is offering, exactly?
posted by ook at 10:47 PM on February 16, 2002

Duh. Thought I was correcting a preview. Instead I was just making myself look like an idiot.
posted by ook at 10:50 PM on February 16, 2002

Because you can?
posted by alana at 1:39 AM on February 17, 2002

And I'm good at it, too, apparently.

Sorry, Su; I really had no intention of derailing this thread so thoroughly.
posted by ook at 7:15 AM on February 17, 2002

I wonder if this has anything to do with Adobe's Opensource stuff. I played with the Photoshop / Python stuff a bit but found it basically just encapsulated the somewhat complex C API in Python. I was hoping it let me code out something a little more powerful than Photoshop's Actions without worrying about too much complexity. Maybe now that I've polished my programming skills some I'll have to go back and take a look.
posted by mutagen at 10:29 PM on February 17, 2002

Perhaps I can now make up for my earlier idiocy (or at least just dig myself in even deeper):

The developer of scriptographer just emailed me with an explanation of the version 10 thing. The short version is, he started writing the plugin before Illustrator had .js capability; then Adobe went and built it in themselves before he finished. Which must've been a bummer and a half for the poor guy.
posted by ook at 7:40 AM on February 18, 2002