[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.

[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.

[Daniel Lloyd]

>.< I think that's exactly the problem I am having. I'll investigate this tomorrow, but that might be just the problem. As it currently stands, I'm not sure if the swatch has been added to the document's swatches. More tomorrow morning as it develops.

[Daniel Lloyd]

That is exactly the issue that I’m having. Do you know how I could bring that about? I’ve tried playing around with it it (as mentioned in my previous post), but no joy…

[Daniel Lloyd]

Please excuse the delay in responding to this post (so busy!).

Okay, here is what my base action looks like:
Knockout: land
1) Copy
2) Paste in back
3) Set Color
Fill Color – Gray: 5%
4) Set Color
Stroke color – Gray: 5%
5) Set Stroke
Weight 1.5 pt
Cap: Butt Cap
Miter Limit: 4
Join: miter join
Dashed LInes: 0
Alignment: Center
6) Attribute Setting
Fill Overprint: No
7) Attribute Setting
Stroke Overprint: No

This ends up with a copy of the piece of text that masks out the line work underneath.

The Issue: when recording actions, I can use the color palette to make changes to a piece of text and know that these changes will be picked up (for example, a 5% grayscale fill). With the pantone color, the actions palate will not record this change as a 5% PANTONE fill, but rather as a 5% grayscale fill.

This color palette was opened, btw, using Window->Swatch Libraries->Color Books->Pantone Solid Matte. I was working with Pantone Yellow M as an example, and trying to replace the “5% Gray stroke/fill” portions with a corresponding pantone color.

Does that help?

[Daniel Lloyd]

I’m sorry, I am not quite sure what information is being requested here: would you like the completed actions from start to finish, or would you like the steps that are added to the action palette when I hit record and attempt to build the action?

Also, please excuse the typos in the previous post!