• Adobe Illustrator

  Variables in Illustrator: Some questions

  Posted by Lucas Stefanini on August 21, 2018 at 12:32 pm

  Hello all.

  I’ve lurked Creative Cow for some years now and always found the community to be very helpful! Most of the issues I’ve had in the past were previously solved by members of the forums and I come today to ask for some advice.

  I am used to working with text variables on my Illustrator documents, but I am struggling with some new demands:
  1. The document I am working on is a 2″x1,5″ artboard. More than one of these can fit in a single A4 sheet. Is there a way to export multiple datasets in a single page? Like a grid, for cutting after printed? Any ideas of workarounds if this can’t be accomplished?

  2. I have a conditional element to incorporate in the datasets: I would like to display or hide an object (changing its appearance/color/stroke is also viable) based on an entry on the XML document. Is this possible?

  3. Is there a way to import some basic formating (like font weight or color) along with the bare text strings of the dataset? I know I can manually edit each entry after importing, but since I have quite a few to do so, a more efficient method would be appreciated.

  Thanks in advance! 🙂

  Tom Van damme replied 7 years, 9 months ago 2 Members · 1 Reply
• 1 Reply

• 

  Tom Van damme

  August 22, 2018 at 7:52 am

  Hi Lucas,

  these things would be pretty straightforward in Indesign, but I have never tried to do anything like that in Illustrator.
  I’d like to see if anyone ever has ☺

  About the conditional formatting: I don’t think that would be possible. As far as I know Illustrator doesn’t “read” the data that it imports – it just enters the content and that’s it. I tried the same thing in Indesign a few times, to no success.

  If anyone has a workaround I’d be very interested ????

  Cheers,
  Tom

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