How do I auto set stroke weight, stroke colors & fill color?

Question

Hi,
I'd like to make it easier for our 100,000 designers to use AI to make custom products using a laser cutter.
Current Practice
Designers open our AI laser cutting design templates, add their designs using the AI settings our online pricing system can read, then upload their designs to our website for instant pricing, making and shipping.
The Problem
Designers have to manually setup AI with settings that can be read by our online pricing system. If they get these settings wrong, our system can not read their designs. So they are rejected and can not be priced or made. This happens more often that you'd imagine.
The Solution
Designers do not like design rejections. So I'd like to eradicate them by providing our designers with a version of AI that provides the following settings only:
* Set document to RGB
* Stroke weight = 0.01mm
* Stroke colors = RGB 0, 0, 255 and 255, 0, 0
* Fill color = RGB 0, 0, 0
This will mean designers have a very limited number of AI choices, with nothing to distract them or to get wrong. Which will result in less (or zero?) design rejections. And products made faster than before. Rejoice!
Question
How do we program our AI laser cutting design templates so that when they are opened in AI, they auto set AI settings as defined above?
Thanks so much.
Derek

Answer 1

Ponoko wrote:
Your first point - yes, that's what our system does currently. As a result designers get lots of 'how to fix' messages as a result of design rejections. We wish to reduce these rejections and resulting 'how to fix' messages by limiting their choices in AI - because this is where the problems are created.
Ok, yeah gotcha, so customers/designers think they do it right (cough/laugh) upload, then get surprised to find out they didn't by your upload system. That's kind of what I thought. I feel your pain. ;-) I sense you want to reduce this aspect to keep the customers/designers happy and thinking they do nothing but work magic all day right? ;-) So you don't want to lose customers in the midst of frustration of file rejection thinking there files are right and your system is certainly wrong, when in fact it's the opposite. Good luck explaining that to a designer however, right? ;-)
Ponoko wrote:
Your second point - You go on to talk about using a complex "action" we could distribute within the design templates. Although I suspect this is different, the path we're thinking is to include something in the templates that, when imported into AI, sets AI with the color palette we need, line weight we need. Possible?
As Monika hinted at you can't rigidly restrict or control what a user is allowed to do and use in Illustrator. You can try to reduce the parameters by saving the file as a Template.ait file, but even then they can muck about all day until they mess things up again, plus you have no control whatsoever even then as to whether they use fills, the stroke weights, etc. That is why I mentioned various things to manipulate the file once they deem it completed and ready to submit/upload. Basically a method to fix what they messed up or did incorrectly and instead set things as they should be for submission as I previously mentioned. I mentioned you may be able to create a complex Illustrator "action" action.aia that they run to process these requirements. I am not sure if such an action could be accomplished as all inclusive (perhaps though) otherwise you could as stated do it through scripting and a script they run: script.jsx to prepare the requirements, or an actual standalone helper app you create and provide like I mentioned above as well.
I see for CorelDRAW & Inkscape you require SVG, why not change that for Illustrator also so all your 2D app submissions are SVG based? Then manipulate the SVG server side, point out the changes and why and have the customer approve the new modified SVG Preview of the needed changes and move along with the process from there? Make all the requirement changes on the server by manipulating the SVG. You should have access to all of the requirements: RGB color model, stroke weight, stroke colors, fill colors, create font outlines, image tracing? I am just tossing out ideas here, get your programmers busy, tell them to stop playing video games and "make it so". ;-)
But even so, this then begs the question: What are you doing to circumvent the same issues for inept CorelDraw and Inkscape users?
Since, they have the same freedom to do things incorrectly and misaligned with the requirements, just as Illustrator users do.
Regardless though of the approach customers/designers may not like seeing certain things changed even minutely in trivial amounts and thusly be just as upset or up in arms with the changes to their pretty design files that they think were not needed in the first place, how dare you undermine them ;-). Same as seeing the file rejection from your system upon upload. Again I feel your pain. You have your Application/File requirements requirements stated nicely and plainly, it should be pretty easy for most, but sadly I guess not.