Actions with Pantone Colors in CS3

[Daniel Lloyd]

Thie:
Like a charm! =) Thank you so much for your advice. I had a feeling it was something very simple.

Stuart:
I’ll look into your suggestion, but part of the reason why we are using actions is that is can automate the copy-paste in back process. Furthermore, since we want to keep the text masks in a seperate layer from the text being masked, actions look to be the way to go.

But I will poke around and check that video out.

[Thie Thomsen]

To help you with the additional question (the moving of stuff to a layer named “Z”), I hacked together a little javascript you can run using your illustrator’s script menu item.

It will create a new layer named “Z”, or, if it allready exists, use the existing layer. It will move all of the currently selected items to this layer.

You can put this script in an action by placing it in your Illustrator/Presets/scripts folder (so it shows up in your scripts menu), and add it to your action using the “add menu item” (or something, i’m using a dutch illustrator and do not know the english name) to select the script.

419_movetolayerz.js.zip

Enjoy

—
I can see your spot colours…

[Stuart Gill]

No problem Daniel, there is usually a good reason. I wanted to make sure you were not wasting your time just in case you didn’t realise what the Appearance Panel can do.

You could predefine your mask using the Appearance Panel and save it as a style, then within your action/script you can apply the style to the object.

[Daniel Lloyd]

Thie:

Forgive me for taking so long to get back to you, but thank you so much for the Script. The ability to move items from one layer to another automatically is something that I wish was enabled in Illustrator from the start (Photoshop seems to be more flexible in this regard). I haven’t had a chance to test drive it yet (so busy at the moment at work), but I can’t wait to give it a test run!

Question: do you have any suggestions on a good resources to learn the Javascript langauge? (I’ve always wanted to learn but never gotten around to it).

Stuart:

Interesting..so define a style in the appearence panel. Curious. I’ve never quite “gotten” this palette, but I’ll give it a little more poking around.