the answer was basically, “different product teams.” su and i do a press junket with adobe each year.ĭuring the launch of cs4 i asked why the type tools and layer tools were so inconsistent between illustrator, indesign, and photoshop (these being some of my favorite axes to grind). I can answer a little bit about the cross-application inconsistencies. Why it is that after so many years and so many expensive upgrades that Illustrator’s layers features Photoshop’s layers feature don’t act more or less exactly like one another is a mystery to me.Īnyway, I guess I just wanted to share Matt’s terrific script, which you can download here, and also add some more gripes to the inexhaustible supply of user complaints about gaps and inconsistencies in Adobe’s Creative Suite products. elements (e.g., navigation buttons or a footer) across several layers. That handy feature lets me combine multiple layers to create specific views representing different states of an interface, without having to duplicate persistent U.I. His script Export Illustrator Layers as PNGs doesn’t output PDFs, but a stack of PNGs can be easily enough converted to PDFs, so close enough.Ĭorrection: Matt informs me that this script is in fact capable of outputting PDFs as well as PNGs.Īctually, I realized that what I’m really looking for is not just a way of automating the output of various layers as files, but also a feature that (I think) is missing from Illustrator altogether: layer comps - similar to what’s available in Adobe Photoshop. (To clarify, I accidentally typed “currently visible files” in that tweet when I mean “current visible layers.”) I didn’t get any replies until today, when my friend Matt Ericson told me that my tweet had inspired him to clean up some Illustrator actions that he’d created to do something similar to what I was looking for. So last week I wondered aloud on Twitter whether anyone might already have figured out a way to automate this process.
Even though Adobe is the publisher of Illustrator as well as the originator of the PDF format, there is nothing about this process that’s elegant, to say the least.
Lately I’ve been creating a lot of wireframes in Illustrator and outputting them as PDFs to share with others as well as to send to my iPad for portable viewing.