I’ve just been intro­duced to Scrip­tog­ra­pher, this Illus­tra­tor plu­gin allows you to script actions (in JavaScript) in order to auto­mate things, to raster bitmaps, to cre­ate tools or more.

Being a big Illus­tra­tor fan and know­ing JavaScript quite well I’ve started play­ing with it a bit. It can be a lit­tle tricky when you’re look­ing for doc­u­men­ta­tion or when you’re used to work­ing with a flipped y-axis like in Action­Script but you can achieve nice things with only a few lines of code.

The first script I wrote is called Qink and is some sort of china ink paint­brush. It doesn’t work very well yet so I won’t post it now. Drop a com­ment if you want to try it.

The sec­ond thing I wrote has no name yet but works pretty well. It is not buggy at all but I need to rethink the script a lit­tle before post­ing it. Here’s an exam­ple of what you can do with it:

The con­cept is sim­ple: use any image’s pix­els as your color swatch. Either for live paint­ing, or to apply on a path. Expect nice or funny results! Again, drop a com­ment if you can’t wait.

The third thing is called Qat­tern. This one allows you to quickly and eas­ily build a pat­tern… It’s kind of sim­ple, but a video might explain this better:

I did it to go with my blog theme’s new abil­ity to han­dle back­ground patterns… It’s work­ing alright so here is the source code! Play with it, break it and send feed­back… I’m sure things can be improved, if you’ve got sug­ges­tions, share them!