Hi, I'm Harris Lapiroff.

I’ve been working on a CD album insert for Emma as a design project. It has a lot of song lyrics and for compactness we’ve replaced line breaks in the lyrics with slashes:

I thought it would be nice if the slashes played their role as more muted visual elements rather than looking like prime elements of the content, so I decided to color them all gray.

This was a tedious thing to do manually one-by-one for roughly 150 slashes, especially if I was going to have to do it multiple times through rounds of editing. I also couldn’t find a way to do it quickly in the Illustrator GUI – find and replace worked only on text, not formatting, and I couldn’t find other functionality that would work. I ended up writing a quick script in Javascript to do it for me:

const docRef = app.activeDocument;
const story = docRef.stories[0];
const characters = story.textRange.characters;
const charStyle = docRef.characterStyles.getByName('Slash');

// Find all the slashes
var slashes = [];
for (var i = 0; i < characters.length; i++) {
    if (characters[i].contents === '/') {
        slashes.push(characters[i]);
    }
}

// Color all the slashes gray
for (var i = 0; i < slashes.length; i++) {
    charStyle.applyTo(slashes[i]);
}

This was a reasonably quick and pretty satisfying solution. I did need to manually create the character style for slashes and name it “Slash.” I could have had the script do this, but it was easier to do this one-off task by hand and I was able to visually test exactly which gray I wanted in the process. Then I ran the script with File › Scripts › Other Script….

Though it is incredibly cool that Illustrator supports scripting with Javascript, it also, annoyingly, doesn’t support the modern language features I’ve gotten used to writing with Javascript for Node or browsers. This script is reasonably simple as is, but it could have been very short if I’d been able to use .filter() and .forEach(). Instead I had to do the clumsy filtering and for loops seen above¹. It didn’t even let me use arrow functions or let²! I hope Adobe will update this in future versions.

By the way, go listen to Emma’s album! It’s fantastic!

1. Yeah, yeah, I could have collapsed it into one loop if I wanted, fine. ↩︎

2. This was especially confusing because I am under the impression that let and const were introduced into the language at the same time and it clearly tolerates the latter. It’s possible I was actually running into a different issue – the debugging capabilities also weren’t great and I didn’t look into it for too long. ↩︎