Making same length text and evenly distributing it

Question

Hi all,
I'm creating a series of posters and I need to have lines of text with single words or phrases of the same length. Obviously the font size would need to change up or down depending on the number of letters per word/phrase that need to be squeezed in the given length.
The distance between lines needs to be the same (ie 2mm).
At the moment, I'm doing these manually, ie, I'm typing the text and manually entering the width and then aligning all the words and phrases to create a rectangular block of text. Also, I manually adjust the distance between each line, since using the distribute doesn't yield the desired effect...
Is there anyway to sort of automate parts of the above process as I need to make a few posters with different texts.
Thanks in advance for your help.

Answer 1

here you go, select your text frames before running. It should work in CS4 and ealier, I'll have access to CS5 tomorrow, will test there, hope it works too.
#target Illustrator
//  script.name = textBlock_CS4.jsx; // not tested on CS5 yet.
//  script.description = converts selected point textFrames into a Block of Text;
//  script.required = one document with at least two selected text frames;
//  script.parent = carlos canto // 12/4/11;
//  script.elegant = false;
if (app.documents.length > 0)
                    var sel = idoc.selection;
                    if (sel.length>1)
                                        var width = prompt ("Enter desired Text Block width", 300, "Text Block"); //
                                        if (width!=null) // quit if pressed Cancel
                                                            var idoc = app.activeDocument;
                                                            //var ilayer = idoc.activeLayer;
                                                            var dupLayer = idoc.layers.add(); // add a layer to place the new block of text
                                                            dupLayer.name = "Text Block";
                                                            var blockGrp = dupLayer.groupItems.add(); // add a group to final output
                                                            blockGrp.name = "Text Block";
                                                            var left = idoc.width/3; // place block at the bottom 3rd of the page
                                                            var top = idoc.height/3
                                                            var spacingMM = prompt ("Enter spacing in Millimeters", 2, "Text Block"); // text lines spacing in mm
                                                            var spacingPts = new UnitValue(spacingMM,"mm").as ("pt") // convert to points
                                                            for (i=0; i<sel.length; i++) // loop thru selection
                                                                                if (sel[i].typename == "TextFrame") { // continue if textFrame, ignore other pageItems
                                                                                          var itext = sel[i].duplicate(blockGrp, ElementPlacement.PLACEATEND); // duplicate text
                                                                                          itext.selected = false; // deselect it
                                                                                          grpName = itext.contents; // get contents to name outline group
                                                                                          var ioutlined = itext.createOutline(); // create outlines
                                                                                          ioutlined.name = grpName; // rename group
                                                                                          var perCent = width/ioutlined.width*100; // get scaling percentage, based on desired width of block
                                                                                          var scaleMatrix = app.getScaleMatrix(perCent, perCent);
                                                                                          ioutlined.transform (scaleMatrix); // scale outlined text
                                                                                          ioutlined.left = left; // position text
                                                                                          ioutlined.top = top+ioutlined.height+spacingPts; // top = previous item top + spacing + current item
                                                                                          top = ioutlined.top // get current top to use on next item
                                                                                } // end if - non text frames
                                                                      } // end for loop - selection
                                                  } // end check prompt for calcel
                              } // end if selection > 1
                    else
                                        alert ("Select at least 2 textFrames before running");
     } // end at least one document
else
        alert ("There are no open documents");
Message was edited by: CarlosCanto