Being a graphic designer, I find myself attached to the Adobe Suite of packages, namely InDesign, Photoshop and Illustrator. I use these programs nearly on a daily basis in some form or another (Photoshop since I was fifteen!) Over the years I've learned and relearned different techniques that've helped me hone my skills as a graphic designer, though I didn't think I would ever apply my ever developing scripting skills when it came to graphic design.

Adobe Illustrator allows for scripting usage, with its own language called "Extendscript", which is built on top of Javascript, which in turn is based on the ECMAScript 3 (ES3) standard from way back in 1999. So no fancy modern JS syntax will work for ES, but in its current state it was more than enough to aid me.

Graphic artwork can become tedious, especially when there's multiple graphics layered on top of one another. It can become difficult to grab just the right piece(s) and position them in just the right place. There is the the direct select tool, though sometimes grabbing the edge of an object will select all if it's in a group (and I accidently grab the edge a lot) and sometimes I just need to quickly grab multiple objects without fear of selecting the anchor points and deforming the object.

Enter "Donn's RecSelect" script. With this script, I make a box around the object(s) I want to select, no matter it's position versus other objects, then I run the script will take the active selection (our box), then loop through every object on the artboard and compare it to the selection. If any objects' bounding box fall within the bounding box of the current selection, those objects are then selected, and the active selection is deleted. Now we have our object(s) selected, no matter its position or visibility if another object complete covers it.

The combination of graphic design and scripting seems endless with the knowledge of Extendscript, though that involves diving deeper into the documentation and we know how exciting that can be...