Introduction to Adobe Scripting using JavaScript

Course Description

This course is aimed at artists and designers who are proficient in using Adobe products such as Acrobat, Photoshop and InDesign but would like to learn how to automate some of the more repetitive tasks they encounter using the JavaScript programming language. At the end of the course participants will be able to write scripts that will run within Adobe products to perform a specific task and writing batch processing scripts that will make the same change to a series of files in a folder or a directory tree.
3 Days
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Introduction to Scripting

Scripting languages - JavaScript, ActionScript, AppleScript, VB Script, Visual Basic. NB: This course will concentrate on JavaScript
Actions
Scripts
ExtendScript Toolkit - jsx
Executing scripts from within Adobe products
Executing scripts from the command line

Programming basics

Variables
Arrays
Functions
Loops
Conditional Statements
Objects
Exception handling

Adobe document objects

Introduction to Illustrator document object
Use document object to list elements in document
Modify an existing element
Add a new element
Introduction to Photoshop document object
Use document object to list elements in document
Modify an existing element
Real world example - delete all empty pages from a document

More advanced document object operations

More detail on the Illustrator document object
Implementation of a more difficult Illustrator task
More detail on the Photoshop document object
Implementation of a more difficult Photoshop task
More detail on the Acrobat document object
Implementation of a more difficult Acrobat task

Managing files

The Folder object
Listing documents
Opening an existing document
Modifying a document
Saving & closing a document
Creating a new document
Renaming an existing document

Batch processing

Executing a script from the command line
Getting a list of files in the folder
Open each file
Make a change - for example add a watermark
Save each file
Save each file in a different directory
Save each file with a different name

Real world example

Extract all text from a Photoshop or Illustrator document
Write all text to a file
Translate the text using google translate
Reinsert text into the document
Save the document with a different name

More advanced programming topics

Logging progress
Debugging techniques
Searching for elements
Advanced searching - regular expressions
Real world example - find all email addresses in a document
Recursion - processing all files in a tree

Participant exercises

Generally participants will have one or more specific tasks that they would like to script and are encouraged to bring along their own examples to work through as part of the final section.
AdobeJavaScriptScriptingAdobe Scripting