Adobe 26001360 Scripting Guide - Page 17

2 Scripting Basics If you use Illustrator, then you work with documents and their contents. You create documents, layers, colors, and design elements. If you do all of this, you've probably gotten used to thinking of an Illustrator document as a series of objects. Automating Illustrator with scripting uses the same object-oriented way of thinking. The heart of a scriptable application is the object model. In Illustrator, the object model contains documents, layers, colors, and page items-objects that can appear in an Illustrator document. Each type of object has its own special properties, and every object in an Illustrator document has its own identity. In this chapter, we'll cover the basic concepts of scripting for both AppleScript on Mac OS and Visual Basic on Windows. This brief introduction to the basic concepts and syntax of each scripting language is by no means complete or exhaustive. The bibliography contains references to more complete language guides for both scripting languages. For detailed information on using your particular scripting system with Illustrator, see the appropriate reference chapter later in this manual. Experienced scripters may want to skip to those chapters now. Object model concepts The terminology of object oriented programming can be hard to understand, at first. "Objects" belong to "classes" and have "properties" you manipulate using "commands" (AppleScript) or "methods" (Visual Basic). What do these words mean in this context? Here's a way to think about objects and their properties. Imagine that you live in a house that responds to your commands (you can think of this house as technologically advanced, or magical, or both). The house is an object, and its properties might include the number of rooms, the color of the exterior paint, or the date of its construction. 17