How to get bounds of bounding box of text item.

Question

Hi all,
I am trying to get the bounds of bounding box of paragraph text item. I found the following link,
the coordinate of a bounding box is the same as the layer's coordinate?
But the solution doesn't work for me. It gives me the layer's bound every time i.e. the bounds of actual text.
Can someone have any idea how to accomplish this?
Thanks.

Answer 1

It's a known "not trivial". You have layer.textItem.width/height, but they don't always report correct values. I.e. if the layer or doc has been resized, those values are missing scale multipliers. Worse it's works differently wrong in different versions of CC and Mac/Win. What I use is below (with some utility functions missing), but it's just CC 2012 and 2014 (CS6 is just bounds).
Alternatively you can get this stuff on Action Manager only, but I'm not familiar enough and let other comment on it.
Photoshop = {
  getTextExtents: function (layer) {
  if (layer && layer.textItem) {
  var text_item = layer.textItem
  if (Photoshop.isCC2014() || (Photoshop.isMac() && Photoshop.isCC2012())) { // in mac the newer method is correct also in CC2012
  return Photoshop._getTextExtentsCC2014(text_item)
  } else if (Photoshop.isCC2012()) {
  return Photoshop._getTextExtentsCC2012(text_item)
  } else {
  return Photoshop._getTextExtentsCS6(text_item)
  _getTextExtentsCC2014: function (text_item) {
  app.activeDocument.activeLayer = text_item.parent
  var ref = new ActionReference()
  ref.putEnumerated( charIDToTypeID("Lyr "), charIDToTypeID("Ordn"), charIDToTypeID("Trgt") )
  var action = executeActionGet(ref)
  //Photoshop._debugActionKeys(action)
  var textKey = action.getObjectValue(stringIDToTypeID('textKey'))
  var bounds = textKey.getObjectValue(stringIDToTypeID('bounds'))
  var width = bounds.getUnitDoubleValue (stringIDToTypeID('right'))
  var height = bounds.getUnitDoubleValue (stringIDToTypeID('bottom'))
  var x_scale = 1
  var y_scale = 1
  if (textKey.hasKey(stringIDToTypeID('transform'))) { 
  var transform = textKey.getObjectValue(stringIDToTypeID('transform'))
  x_scale = transform.getUnitDoubleValue (stringIDToTypeID('xx'))
  y_scale = transform.getUnitDoubleValue (stringIDToTypeID('yy'))
  x_scale *= width / text_item.width
  y_scale *= height / text_item.height
  return {
  x:Math.round(text_item.position[0]),
  y:Math.round(text_item.position[1]),
  width:Math.round(width*x_scale),
  height:Math.round(height*y_scale) }
  _getTextExtentsCC2012: function(text_item) {
  app.activeDocument.activeLayer = text_item.parent
  var ref = new ActionReference()
  ref.putEnumerated( charIDToTypeID("Lyr "), charIDToTypeID("Ordn"), charIDToTypeID("Trgt") )
  var action = executeActionGet(ref)
  var textKey = action.getObjectValue(stringIDToTypeID('textKey'))
  //Photoshop._debugActionKeys(textKey)
  var bounds = textKey.getObjectValue(stringIDToTypeID('bounds')) 
  var width = bounds.getUnitDoubleValue (stringIDToTypeID('right')) 
  var height = bounds.getUnitDoubleValue (stringIDToTypeID('bottom')) 
  var x_scale = 1
  var y_scale = 1
  if (textKey.hasKey(stringIDToTypeID('transform'))) { 
  var transform = textKey.getObjectValue(stringIDToTypeID('transform'))
  x_scale = transform.getUnitDoubleValue (stringIDToTypeID('xx'))
  y_scale = transform.getUnitDoubleValue (stringIDToTypeID('yy'))
  return {
  x:Math.round(text_item.position[0]),
  y:Math.round(text_item.position[1]),
  width:Math.round(width*x_scale),
  height:Math.round(height*y_scale)
  _getTextExtentsCS6: function (text_item) {
  var layer = text_item.parent
  return {
  x:Photoshop.getLayerLeft(layer),
  y:Photoshop.getLayerBottom(layer),
  width:Photoshop.getLayerWidth(layer),
  height:Photoshop.getLayerHeight(layer)