Illustrator VBA scripting 101 - via Excel

Question

This post will attempt to introduce newcomers to Illustrator Visual Basic Scripting (well, not actually vbs, but rather tru VBA, Visual Basic for Applications). I personally prefer vba over bvs for a number of reasons. First, I always have Excel and Illustrator open, so it makes sense for me use it to drive Ai. Second, I usually need to transfer data between the two programs. Third...I love the Excel IDE...ok, let's get right into it.
- Open Excel
- hit Alt+F11, to bring up the editor
- in the Tools menu, click on References...
- add a reference to "Adobe Illustrator CS5 Type Library"
- in the Personal.xls (or in any other book) add a Module. Personal is a global workbook that is always available. If you don't see it, go back to Excel and record a macro, anything will do. That will create the Personal file.
- and type the following in that module
- we have to continue the tradition and do the "HelloWorld" script
Sub helloWorld()
    Dim iapp As New Illustrator.Application
    Dim idoc As Illustrator.Document
    Dim iframe As Illustrator.TextFrame
    Set idoc = iapp.ActiveDocument
    Set iframe = idoc.TextFrames.Add
    iframe.Contents = "Hello World from Excel VBA!!"
    Set iframe = Nothing
    Set idoc = Nothing
    Set iapp = Nothing
End Sub
- save Personal book
- open Illustrator and create a new document first
- to run, move the cursor anywhere inside the Sub...End Sub and hit F5
that's it for now...in the following posts we'll move the text to the middle of the page, create new documents, get data from an Excel Range to Illustrator, get data from Illustrator text frame to an Excel Range...and more, hopefully.
questions? comments?

Answer 1

Lesson 4: Creating Shapes, Working with Selections, writing data to Excel
In the Illustrator world a shape is a....well, I'm not going to bore you with technical terms only rocket scientists would understand....let's just say a Circle is a shape, as well as a Rectangle or a Star, there much better than the actual definition. Then in the scripting lingo all shapes are pathItems.
There are a number of ways of creating shapes, in this exercise well focus on using the various Methods of the PathItem Object.
to create a Circle we'll use the Ellipse Method, all arguments are optional, if we don't supply any, the method uses default values.
Ellipse
([top as Double]
[, left as Double]
[, width as Double]
[, height as Double]
[, reversed as Boolean]
[, inscribed as Boolean])
Dim icircle As Illustrator.PathItem
Set icircle = idoc.PathItems.Ellipse(300, 300, 100, 100)
similarly, to create a square, we use the Rectangle Method
Dim isquare As Illustrator.PathItem
Set isquare = idoc.PathItems.Rectangle(200, 200, 100, 100)
and to make a star we use the...hum...the Star Method
Dim istar As Illustrator.PathItem
Set istar = idoc.PathItems.Star(400, 400, 100, 50, 5)
now lets select the square and read some of its properties and write them down to Excel
isquare.Selected = True
get properties of the top most selection, in case we have many items selected, for now it should only be the square
    w = idoc.Selection(0).Width
    h = idoc.Selection(0).Height
    y = idoc.Selection(0).top
    x = idoc.Selection(0).left
and lets write those values to Excel, using the Cells object this time. Make sure you have a blank Excel book open, it will write data to the first 4 rows, 2 first columns
    Cells(1, 1) = "width: "
    Cells(1, 2) = w
    Cells(2, 1) = "height: "
    Cells(2, 2) = h
    Cells(3, 1) = "top: "
    Cells(3, 2) = y
    Cells(4, 1) = "left: "
    Cells(4, 2) = x
here's the complete code, from now on, we'll start every exercise with a blank Excel book and a blank Illustrator document, so please do that before runing.
Sub lesson4shapes()
    Dim iapp As New Illustrator.Application
    Dim idoc As Illustrator.Document
    Dim icircle As Illustrator.PathItem
    Dim isquare As Illustrator.PathItem
    Dim istar As Illustrator.PathItem
    Set idoc = iapp.ActiveDocument
    Set icircle = idoc.PathItems.Ellipse(300, 300, 100, 100)
    Set isquare = idoc.PathItems.Rectangle(200, 200, 100, 100)
    Set istar = idoc.PathItems.Star(400, 400, 100, 50, 5)
    isquare.Selected = True
    w = idoc.Selection(0).Width
    h = idoc.Selection(0).Height
    y = idoc.Selection(0).top
    x = idoc.Selection(0).left
    Cells(1, 1) = "width: "
    Cells(1, 2) = w
    Cells(2, 1) = "height: "
    Cells(2, 2) = h
    Cells(3, 1) = "top: "
    Cells(3, 2) = y
    Cells(4, 1) = "left: "
    Cells(4, 2) = x
    Set istar = Nothing
    Set isquare = Nothing
    Set icircle = Nothing
    Set idoc = Nothing
    Set iapp = Nothing
End Sub
Note that the code we just wrote is not the most efficient way of doing things, we don't have to select an object in order to work on it (get the properties for instance). We did it for illustration purposes, we could also use a loop to write data to Excel. We'll do that in the next lesson.
also, note that the top/left values don't match exactly with the values we entered (200, 200), homework, can you tell why?