panthernuru / ai2ass

A script to export ASS vector objects from Adobe Illustrator.

AI2ASS

This is a script to export^† drawings in Adobe Illustrator as ASS vector objects. It was inspired by tophf's similar script for CorelDRAW.

_{^†The exporting process consists of sticking generated ASS into a window that has copyable text. This is still terrible design, but at least it's slightly better than it used to be.}

Features and Limitations

It only acts upon the currently focused document in Illustrator.

It should work with most versions of Illustrator.

Has been used with CS5, CS6 and CC versions of Illustrator.

Can export the current layer or all layers at once.

Shapes are separated both by layer and the prefixes of the chosen output format (which may include color, stroke, opacity and clipping paths).

Paths that share all these attributes can be merged into a single line. The following merge strategies are available:

• Disabled: turns line merging off
• Safe: merges lines in a way that doesn't disturb your scene graph order
• Ignore Blending Order: merges all paths of a layer sharing a common prefix without respect to their order within the layer.

It supports RGB and Grayscale colorspaces

CMYK support may be added at some point in the future if I ever find a conversion algorithm that works properly.

It can output shapes wrapped in {\p1}, \clip, \iclip, raw shape data, or complete dialogue lines.

All output shape data uses coordinates with two decimal places of precision. Modern ASS renderers should be able to handle these properly. If you are worried about people running horribly old and terrible software, don't. If you're using this to do typesetting, odds are it'll be too slow to run on their setup anyway.

Exports clipping paths as \clips of their respective lines

There is basic transparency support

AI2ASS correctly calculates the opacity for every path and exports it as \alpha override tag. However, output will only be correct when not using any of the blending modes unsupported in ASS (which is all of them except the Normal mode).

Great, but how do I run it?

Place AI2ASS.jsx in your Illustrator scripts folder.

On OS X, the scripts folder should be something like /Applications/Adobe Illustrator CS6/Presets/en_US/Scripts.

On Windows, it'll be C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Illustrator CS6 (64 Bit)\Presets\en_US\Scripts , assuming you're running the 64-bit version (thanks, __ar).

If you launch Illustrator, the script should now appear in the menu as File > Scripts > AI2ASS. Running this will pop up a persistent window with a button you can click to convert the active layer into an ASS drawing. You don't need to close this ever. It's neat.

WARNING: SHIT MOVES SLOW WHEN YOU HAVE A LOT OF STUFF GOING ON

But there's a cool progress bar so you can see that it's going slow.

TODO

• AINT NOTHIN THIS IS PERFECT

License

ISC. See COPYING for details.