What Is Scripting; Why Use Scripting; What About Actions; System Requirements - Adobe 23101335 - Photoshop - PC Manual

1.2 What is scripting?

A script is a series of commands that tells Photoshop to perform a set of specified actions.
These actions can be simple, and affect only a single object in the current document, or
complex and affect many objects in a Photoshop document. The actions can call Photoshop
alone or also invoke other applications.
Scripts can automate repetitive tasks and be used as a creative tool to streamline tasks that
might be too time consuming to do manually. For example, you could write a script to generate
a number of localized versions of a particular image; or to gather information about the
various color profiles used by a collection of images.

1.3 Why use scripting?

Graphic design is a field characterized by creativity, but aspects of the actual work of
illustration and image manipulation are anything but creative. Scripting provides a tool to help
save time spent on repetitive production tasks such as resizing or reformatting documents.
Start with short, simple scripts to save a few seconds a day, and move on to more involved
scripts. Any repetitive task is a good candidate for a script. Once you can identify the steps and
conditions involved in performing the task, you're ready to write a script to take care of it.

1.4 What about actions?

Photoshop actions are different from scripts. A Photoshop action is a series of tasks you have
recorded while using the application—menu choices, tool choices, selection, and other
commands. When you "play" an action, Photoshop performs all of the recorded commands.
Actions and scripts are both ways of automating repetitive tasks, but they work very
differently.
You cannot add conditional logic to an action. Unlike a script, actions cannot make
decisions based on the current situation.
A single script can target multiple hosts. Actions can't. For example, you could target both
Photoshop and Illustrator in the same script.

1.5 System requirements

The language you use to write scripts depends on your operating system: AppleScript for Mac;
Visual Basic for Windows; or JavaScript, a cross-platform scripting language that can run on
either Windows or Mac. While the scripting systems differ, the ways that they work with
Photoshop are very similar.
Photoshop 7.0 Scripting Guide
Introduction
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What is scripting?
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