Calling Adobe Illustrator from PHP

[Nash12]

Hi there,

what I want to do on my Windows server: open Illustrator, make it open a JavaScript file and execute it (manually you would go to File -> Scripts), all controlled via PHP.

Unfortunately I got no idea on how to do this. I only got some codesnippet, that opens Illustrator. Not that much, I´d say:

$WshShell = new COM("WScript.Shell");
$illustrator = $WshShell->Run("Illustrator.exe", 3, true); 

I googled quite a lot on this, but found actually nothing... I have no idea where to look at to find something on Illustrators Object hierarchy.

Has anyone done something before like this with Illustrator? Any documentation you could point me to?

Help would be greatly appreciated!

[logic_earth]

Why can't you just click on the Illustrator icon in the start menu and go to File > Scripts...Maybe I just don't understand why one needs to do this.

Adobe products arn't really a command line thing, just accessing one from the command line "Illustrator help" doesn't give any message to being wrong or right just opens.

[Nash12]

Because I want to generate PDFs on the fly using Illustrator.

[Ize]

You can do that without Illustrator

[alvas]

Try using fpdf

http://www.fpdf.org/

[Nash12]

I do know that there are enough pdf libs for php out there, but I want to have a go with Illustrator.

Does really nobody know how to do this?

[logic_earth]

You can't Illustrator has no command line connections.

[stevewebdev2005]

change the file association on your pc for .js to illustrator

then in php e.g (jsx extension for photoshop script)

exec(escapeshellcmd("your_script.jsx"));

I've done this with a complicated graphics processing application that required photoshop filtering capabilities beyond what imagemagick could do and it works fine. Any dynamic data that required passing I wrote into the javascript before calling it.

Should work ok with Illustrator too.
Have a look too at http://partners.adobe.com/public/dev...ingStarted.pdf
if you haven't already.

[Nash12]

I knew that .jsx thingy already, but I thought there was another way e.g. using com. But as it seems not, or at least nobody seems to know. I´ll go with the .jsx file approach then. Thanks.