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Adobe Illustrator CS Scripting Guide
number of panes property which the opening class doesn't. In Illustrator, path items, for
example, have the property stroke color which isn't inherited from the page item class.
Object elements or collections
Object elements (AppleScript) or collections (Visual Basic) are objects contained within other
objects. For example, rooms are elements (or collections) of our house, contained within the
house object. In Illustrator, documents are elements of the application object, and page items
are elements of a document object.
Object references
The objects in your documents are arranged in a hierarchy like the house object—page items
are in layers, which are inside a document, which is inside Illustrator. When you send a
command to an Illustrator object, you need to make sure you send the message to the right
object. To do this, you identify objects by their position in the hierarchy. You might, for
example, write the following statement.
AppleScript
page item 1 of layer 1 of document 1
Visual Basic
Documents(1).Layers(1).PageItems(1)
When you identify an object in this fashion, you're creating an object reference. AppleScript and
Visual Basic use different ways of creating object references, but the idea is the same—to give
the script a way of finding the object you want to work with.
Scripting concepts
Comments
Comments are a way to add descriptive text to a script. Comments come in handy when you
want to document the operation of a script (for yourself or for someone else). The use of
comments is the most important technique for good scripting. Comments are where you
should leave important notes about the specific operation of a script that might provide
12 Aug 03
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