Many are familiar with a common challenge in Illustrator -- a bunch of text that should all be contained within a single string of text, but that instead is broken up and spread about your file as multiple individual text blocks. This can happen for a variety of reasons, but most commonly it is because you've moved text from the newer text engine that was added in Illustrator CS to an older version (or "legacy" version) of Illustrator, or because you've opened a generic PDF file.
Many people aren't aware that you can simply select all of the individual text objects, choose Edit > Copy, and then simply paste into an existing text object -- all the text will be magically "sewn together" into a single string. There are also several scripts out there (Rick Johnson's Concat Text being one of them) that help this process along as well, without the manual process of copying and pasting.
Now, Justin Putney and Amy Petersen of Ajar Productions, have developed a script as well, which when run, throws up a dialog box asking how you'd like to join the text (other scripts usually rely on stacking order or the order in which the text was created). In addition, the script is installed using Adobe's Extension Manager, which is actually a nice little AIR application that Flash, Dreamweaver and Fireworks have utilized in the past, but it's refreshing to see it being used now with Illustrator as well (CS4 required for that version of the script).
More detailed information as well as the script itself can be had here. Once the script is installed, launch Illustrator, select your chopped-up text and choose File > Scripts > MergeText_AI. Season to taste, and enjoy!
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5 comments:
Thank you!!
There is a MUCH better set of text scripts at Kurt's website
http://illustrator.hilfdirselbst.ch/dokuwiki/en/skripte/javascript/tx_tools
these work with text broken by kerning as well as other situations.
Thanks for tip Mordy! This is great! I reblogged this at:
http://www.zoom-in.com/blog/design/simon-yuen/adobedesign/new-script-sews-illustrator-text-together
Hello
My apologies for the inappropriate placement of this message! Can anyone please tell me how to ask mordy a question on this site, rather than post a comment on an existing topic?
I've been searching around on the site but can't work out how to do this.
Cheers
Tony
Hi mordy, have you heard of a script doing the exact opposite ?
I copy paste from my email a bunch of lines of text. They arrive as single line texts, all in a single text object. I would like to have many one line text objects.
(i mostly use this kind of stuff for text animation, and would like to avoid copying texts one by one, or vectorizing it...)
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