What's new in Scriptographer 2.9.070
Jun 28, 2011
- Fix coordinate system adjustments when working with gradient colors
- Fix coordinate system related crash on CS3
- Fix coordinate system adjustments on CS2
- Correct matrix orientation of PlacedFile, PlacedSymbol and Raster objects
- Fix update flicker when modifying TextItem objects.
- Cause screen redraw in tools when new items are created already in onMouseDown, not only when the first onMouseDrag happens.
- Fix issue in Console where document would not point to the currently active document.
- Change short-cuts to not collide with internally assigned ones for tab-switching.
- Fix 'Unknown error' exception in Dialog.fileOpen on Windows.
New in Scriptographer 2.9.064 (Jun 28, 2011)
- Coordinate System Switch:
- To go along with Adobe's switch of the coordinate system orientation in Illustrator CS5, we decided to make the top-down coordinate system the standard setting for new scripts. But since many existing scripts were written specifically for the bottom-up coordinate system that was standard until version 2.8 and CS4, we added a simple switch for users to turn on backward compatibility in their scripts:
- script.coordinateSystem = 'bottom-up';Hello Degrees, Goodbye Radians
- And while we were in the process of yet another transition (maybe one day we will become as good at it as Apple), we figured this was a good moment to say goodbye to the confusing angle units in radians, and welcome the good old degrees as the new standard. Again, there is a switch for scripts to turn on radians instead and remain compatible with old code:
- script.angleUnits = 'radians';We have added these switches to all scripts on the Scriptographer website, to make them backwards compatible with the latest version.
- Tutorials:
- Speaking of tutorials, we spent a lot of time improving the existing ones and writing new ones such as Working with Mouse Vectors, so you may want to have a close look at all the Tutorials.
- New Relative Drawing Functions:
- We also added very convenient new relative drawing functions to the Path object, such as pathItem.lineBy(vector), pathItem.arcBy(vector) and pathItem.curveBy(throughVector, toVector). These define vector shapes relative to the current location using vectors, which in our experience results in much simpler and more readable code.
- These are exciting times for Scriptographer users, as working with Scriptographer keeps getting simpler, and learning to do so too, thanks to a growing amount of resources available online. We think it is a good moment to join the community, as the API is getting more and more finalized and stable too.
New in Scriptographer 2.8.055 (Jun 28, 2011)
- Fix wrong active components in prompt dialogs.
- Fix an issue where list components were not correctly initialised based on their initially set value.
- Fix an issues with keyboard short-cuts: Bringing up the main palette window and the console should work now when documents are open.
- Fix various issues with SpinEdits positions and enabled / disabled states.
- Fix an issue where displaying prompt dialogs would mess up the undo history.
New in Scriptographer 2.8.052 (Jun 28, 2011)
- Fixed a bug in document.getItems(attributes) that prevented attributes.type from being recognised correctly.
- Fixed UI layout issues with older scripts that directly work with the ADM package, where certain items would appear to have their bounding rectangles set incorrectly.
- Fixed an error in the undo history tracking code that prevented item deletion from being detected in some situations and therefore leading to item.isValid() falsely returning true for such items.
- Got version for Mac CS to compile correctly again.
- Fixed a row of issues in the code that generates the Reference templates and improved documentation for some of the new features.
New in Scriptographer 2.8.050 (Jun 28, 2011)
- Script Repository Manager:
- We introduced a new way to organise your scripts that is far more flexible and also more secure, as it prevents you from accidentally overriding your own script files: The Scriptographer Repository Manager lets you define multiple script repositories that serve as root folders for your scripts. These root folders show up in the Scriptographer Main Palette as if they were all nested together in one parent folder, but in fact they can be located anywhere on your hard-drive, and really should be located outside of the Scriptographer folder. In the future this will allow far simpler updates of Scriptographer to new versions, without the risk of any changes to your scripts lost – that is as long as you do not store your changes inside the default Examples folder.
- Palette Improvements:
- We also spent a lot of time thinking about how the already great new Palette class could be made even more useful, simple and flexible. And we believe we came up with some really great ideas that we are soon going to write more about in the tutorial about Displaying Dialog Windows. We also changed many of the example scripts in the Tools folder to use this powerful new feature, so until the tutorials are done, the best way to see how to use it is to look at these scripts.
- Timers:
- Lastly we would like to highlight a feature that might produce a whole new category of scripts: In this release, timers finally became reliable, much faster and stable, allowing them to be used to write background scripts that can continuously change items in the document. This can for example be used for animations, or other playful things, such as the new Throw.js script in the Examples folder. Timers are currently not documented in the reference, but you can use them in the same way as you would in browsers: setInterval() / setTimeout() to set a periodic / one-shot timer, and clearTimeout() / clearTimeout() to abort them again.