Scriptographer.org - News

Version 2.9.070 — Interface Updates & Bug Fixes

Fri, 03 Dec 2010 16:25:50 +0100

Version 2.9.070 just landed, fixing a row of nasty bugs that were introduced by the recent coordinate switch, but also adding a row of great new features, mostly related to the User Interface.

Interface Changes

It is now possible to navigate through the Scriptographer palette using only keyboard short-cuts, increasing the hacker-friendliness of the plugin a lot. When in the list of scripts, the arrow keys navigate the tree list of folders and files in the same way as we are used to for example from OS X's Finder: Up and Down navigate to the previous / next item in the list, while Left and Right collapse and expand folders. Hitting Enter then opens the currently selected script in the script editor of choice, and Cmd-E executes the script. New scripts can be created using Shift-Alt-Cmd-E, and all running scripts can be stopped using Cmd-., even when the interface is unresponsive due to a running loop. If you forgot about these short-cuts, just hover over the buttons in the palette to see them again.

So why don't you download it straight away and play around with the new features. And if you are curious, here a mini change-log for the most important changes and bug fixes.

Change-log

Fix coordinate system adjustments when working with gradient colors
Fix coordinate system related crash on CS3
Fix coordinate system adjustments on CS2
Correct matrix orientation of PlacedFile, PlacedSymbol and Raster objects
Fix update flicker when modifying TextItem objects.
Cause screen redraw in tools when new items are created already in onMouseDown, not only when the first onMouseDrag happens.
Fix issue in Console where document would not point to the currently active document.
Change short-cuts to not collide with internally assigned ones for tab-switching.
Fix 'Unknown error' exception in Dialog.fileOpen on Windows.

Version 2.9.064 Arrived

Sun, 03 Oct 2010 22:23:05 +0200

Just in time for this week's Scriptographer workshop at the ECAL School of Art and Design in Lausanne, we finished work on the new version 2.9. Download while it's fresh!

In this release we added a few important changes that we would like to highlight here:

Coordinate System Switch

To go along with Adobe's switch of the coordinate system orientation in Illustrator CS5, we decided to make the top-down coordinate system the standard setting for new scripts. But since many existing scripts were written specifically for the bottom-up coordinate system that was standard until version 2.8 and CS4, we added a simple switch for users to turn on backward compatibility in their scripts:

script.coordinateSystem = 'bottom-up';

Hello Degrees, Goodbye Radians

And while we were in the process of yet another transition (maybe one day we will become as good at it as Apple), we figured this was a good moment to say goodbye to the confusing angle units in radians, and welcome the good old degrees as the new standard. Again, there is a switch for scripts to turn on radians instead and remain compatible with old code:

script.angleUnits = 'radians';

We have added these switches to all scripts on the Scriptographer website, to make them backwards compatible with the latest version.

Read in more detail about these changes in the tutorials about The Coordinate System and Vector Geometry.

Tutorials

Speaking of tutorials, we spent a lot of time improving the existing ones and writing new ones such as Working with Mouse Vectors, so you may want to have a close look at all the Tutorials.

New Relative Drawing Functions

We also added very convenient new relative drawing functions to the Path object, such as pathItem.lineBy(vector), pathItem.arcBy(vector) and pathItem.curveBy(throughVector, toVector). These define vector shapes relative to the current location using vectors, which in our experience results in much simpler and more readable code.

These are exciting times for Scriptographer users, as working with Scriptographer keeps getting simpler, and learning to do so too, thanks to a growing amount of resources available online. We think it is a good moment to join the community, as the API is getting more and more finalized and stable too.

On this occasion we would like to express a big thank you to ECAL for helping us with our focused efforts by means of a financed research project.

Yours truly, the Scriptographer Team (Florian, Jonathan, and Jürg)

Version 2.8.055 is Up

Tue, 20 Jul 2010 15:36:17 +0200

Version 2.8.055 of Scriptographer was just released, including one new feature and a row of bug fixes:

The very convenient pathItem.getIntersections(other) function was added, which returns all intersections between two path items as CurveLocation objects, whether they are open or closed, simple or compound paths. Behind the scenes, this function performs a simple form of bezier clipping. CurveLocation objects are now used in many other places as well. See the reference for further information, and bear with us while we prepare tutorials to explain their function better. This is functionality that the Pathfinder does not offer itself. In fact, none of the Adobe Illustrator tools offer this exact functionality, so we believe this should open doors to a nice new family of scripts.

The release also fixes these known isues:

Fix wrong active components in prompt dialogs.
Fix an issue where list components were not correctly initialised based on their initially set value.
Fix an issues with keyboard short-cuts: Bringing up the main palette window and the console should work now when documents are open.
Fix various issues with SpinEdits positions and enabled / disabled states.
Fix an issue where displaying prompt dialogs would mess up the undo history.

As always, happy coding, and do not hesitate to get in touch if things do not work as they should or are not clear.

Version 2.8.052

Tue, 08 Jun 2010 16:46:32 +0200

Here a short note to inform you that the new version 2.8.052 was just uploaded. The previously released 2.8.050 introduced a few regressions due to the many under the hood changes, which were quickly identified and fixed. There are not enough changes for a real change-log, but below a list of what was fixed.

If you encountered problems with the previous release, please test again with this one first before reporting.

Fixed a bug in document.getItems(attributes) that prevented attributes.type from being recognised correctly.
Fixed UI layout issues with older scripts that directly work with the ADM package, where certain items would appear to have their bounding rectangles set incorrectly.
Fixed an error in the undo history tracking code that prevented item deletion from being detected in some situations and therefore leading to item.isValid() falsely returning true for such items.
Got version for Mac CS to compile correctly again.
Fixed a row of issues in the code that generates the Reference templates and improved documentation for some of the new features.

2.8.050 Is Out, Welcome on Board, CS5!

Thu, 03 Jun 2010 22:05:55 +0200

It has been a busy couple of weeks here at the Scriptographer HQ, as we were adding new features and writing tutorials, squashing bugs, simplifying things further and also adding support for the new Illustrator CS5.

We are quite excited about the mixture of new things, simplifications and more stability that we added to this release and think it was well worth the wait.

Refer to the change-log for a more complete list of what is new, but here some of the highlights:

Script Repository Manager

We introduced a new way to organise your scripts that is far more flexible and also more secure, as it prevents you from accidentally overriding your own script files: The Scriptographer Repository Manager lets you define multiple script repositories that serve as root folders for your scripts. These root folders show up in the Scriptographer Main Palette as if they were all nested together in one parent folder, but in fact they can be located anywhere on your hard-drive, and really should be located outside of the Scriptographer folder. In the future this will allow far simpler updates of Scriptographer to new versions, without the risk of any changes to your scripts lost – that is as long as you do not store your changes inside the default Examples folder.

Here is how it looks like with my personal configuration of multiple projects done with Scriptographer, all located in different parts of my harddrive:

Palette Improvements

We also spent a lot of time thinking about how the already great new Palette class could be made even more useful, simple and flexible. And we believe we came up with some really great ideas that we are soon going to write more about in the tutorial about Displaying Dialog Windows. We also changed many of the example scripts in the Tools folder to use this powerful new feature, so until the tutorials are done, the best way to see how to use it is to look at these scripts.

Components in palettes now support a couple of new values for component.type: 'font', 'color', 'ruler', 'menu-entry' and 'menu-separator'. But what's even better: If a script changes properties in the values object that is passed to palettes on creation, the palette gets updated automatically and efficiently. In the same way, the components object that is passed to the it now offers simpe access to the created Components, allowing the components to be disabled and enabled again, hidden and shown, list options can be changed, etc.

Please note:

From this release on, the classes previously available through the UI package are now deprecated. The reason for this is that the technology they are based on (ADM) will go away in CS6 when Illustrator will be ported to Cocoa.
In order to prepare for this transition early, and also to simplify the way people work with Scriptographer, we decided to come up with this new way of making UI in Illustrator that we believe is very powerful and incredibly easy. The only classes you need to know of are Palette, Component and Dialog.
Documentation for the previous UI package, now dubbed ADM, is still available at http://scriptographer.org/legacy/adm/.

Timers

Lastly we would like to highlight a feature that might produce a whole new category of scripts: In this release, timers finally became reliable, much faster and stable, allowing them to be used to write background scripts that can continuously change items in the document. This can for example be used for animations, or other playful things, such as the new Throw.js script in the Examples folder. Timers are currently not documented in the reference, but you can use them in the same way as you would in browsers: setInterval() / setTimeout() to set a periodic / one-shot timer, and clearTimeout() / clearTimeout() to abort them again.

This should give a good overview of what is new. We are aware that a lot of things still need better documentation and will now again focus on that part.

We hope you will have as much fun with this release as we had making it.

So that's about it for now from us, time to download and start writing your own scripts!

Version 2.7.044

Sat, 24 Apr 2010 01:39:03 +0200

We just released another maintenance release. This finally solves a row of issues with mysterious crashes that we encountered for quite a while, making this the most stable release ever.

We have given it quite a hard time in our tests and have yet to experience a single crash.

Refer to the change-log for a detailed list of improvements, and expect a bigger update with a row of nice new features soon!

Workshop «Outils Utiles» at ECAL

Mon, 22 Mar 2010 10:39:00 +0100

The 5th Scriptographer workshop was held by Jonathan Puckey and Jürg Lehni. from March 8 to 12 2010 at ECAL in Lausanne.

The students were asked to come up with ideas for useful tools in Illustrator, either for their own needs or for something they identify as generally missing in Illustrator's functionality. During one intense week of teaching a mixture of geometry, scripting and designing simple user interfaces and interactions, the students then worked on turning their ideas into functioning products.

With Time Bandit 2.0, the first result of this week just started to arrive on the Scriptographer.org website now, and a quite astonishing one too. Who would have thought that Illustrator would be useful as an animation tool?

Thanks again to all the students for their enthusiasm for the scripts. We hope your work will inspire you and others to take this way of working further, beyond the scope of these workshops.

Version 2.7.040 Released

Sat, 20 Mar 2010 02:07:29 +0100

Version 2.7.040 was just uploaded. This is a maintenance release that solves a row of issues in the previous release without adding any big features:

Improved undo history tracking and item validation, solving the "invalid item" exceptions that often occurred in connection with undoing.
Fixed issues with tablet data arrays, where setting one type of tablet data would erase all the others.
Display spin edit controls correctly on PC.
Improved working with layers, fixed layer.clone() and hierarchy traversal using layer.previousSibling / layer.nextSibling.
Palette windows now remember their last position.
Prompt and alert dialogs now appear centred on the screen.
Scriptographer window is displayed by default when first launched.
The Hide / Show Scriptographer menu entry is not confused anymore on the first launch.
Added item.index, returning the index within the parent's list of children.

Version 2.7.037 Is Here

Mon, 08 Mar 2010 00:00:26 +0100

Just in time for this week's workshop at ECAL, we released the latest version of Scriptographer. As always this includes a row of bug fixes, and this time also some quite substantial performance improvement in various fields.

But most of all, this includes new functions and classes for creating user interfaces and palettes in very easy ways, as described by the new Displaying Dialog Windows tutorial. Speaking of tutorials, we also wrote quite a few new ones.

As this is the main new feature in this release we are not going to include a detailed change-log this time.

We believe that the new Dialog.prompt(title, items) and new Palette(title, items, values) functionality offers a really great way to make more interactive scripts and we cannot wait to see the outcomes.

This should basically eradicate the need to tinker with any of the complex types in the UI package, which is a good thing, as Adobe will likely move away from ADM in CS6 onwards due to the necessary switch to Cocoa on Mac in order to support 64 Bit. This will break all of Scriptographer's UI code and making it literally impossible to maintain backward compatibility for the UI package. Therefore the methods described in the Displaying Dialog Windows tutorial will be the only ones guaranteed to work in the future in order to create user interfaces in Scriptographer.

As always, download and have fun!

ECAL Research Project and Workshops

Mon, 22 Feb 2010 23:19:52 +0100

We just posted the results of a Scriptographer workshop held at the ECAL in September / October 2009.

This is part of an ongoing effort at the ECAL to use Scriptographer for teaching programming to students of graphic design and interaction design in a way that allows them to use it as a integral part of their daily workflow, in areas where scripting makes sense.

These workshops are part of a research project conducted by Jonathan Puckey and Jürg Lehni and assisted by Florian Pittet. The project started a bit less than one year and will carry on for the whole of 2010.

Each semester there is one workshop in which new ideas for methods and approaches of teaching scripting are tested, and of which the outcome is fed back into the further work on both Scriptographer and the documentation and tutorials that we are currently preparing for it.

One of the early results is a modification of Rhino, the JavaScript engine inside Scriptographer. This modification allows vector algebra to be written in a far more intuitive way, facilitating its use as a base in a one week workshop where students have no pre-requirements in programming or vector geometry. Due to this feature, a complicated line like the following can be rewritten in far more readable way:

var middlePoint = event.lastPoint.add(event.point).divide(2);

becomes:

var middlePoint = (event.lastPoint + event.point) / 2;

Other changes that stem from this project are the recently introduced simplifications in the way the Scriptographer interface works, based on observations made in an early workshop.

We believe that by continuously testing our concepts and code with students, Scriptographer will benefit more and more, both in the API and in the way its interface works.

Big thanks to the ECAL for supporting our efforts and providing brilliant students as guinea pigs ;-)

Expect more materials from other workshops to be posted on this site soon.