2 replies to this topic

[Nick Springer]

When text is exported from Manifold GIS (and maybe others), any text that followed a line feature gets broken into individual letters along the path.

I have written 2 Illustrator CS3 scripts that can be used to clean these up. One script takes a selected group of letters and merges them into a new text-on-path object following the same path as the original. The second script takes the selected group of letters and just merges them into a single text frame (no path) in approximately the same location.

Caveats: the individual letter blocks cannot be in a mask or a group (Manifold does both), or you will get an error. The script assumes that the letters were "laid down" in the Illustrator file in the correct word order. I make no guarantees with this script but it works for me and saved me hours of work. Let me know if you have any problems or suggestions, but I can't promise anything.

 sample.png   7.59K   81 downloads

 TextScripts.zip   1.55K   115 downloads

[François Goulet]

That's great!

Thanks for sharing with us!

[Sean McVeigh]

This is an excellent script! I am reasonably new to GIS and have found it frustrating that all text on curves is broken into individual characters, when you bring files into Illustrator. Previously, if you want to shift road names, you have to do it character by character and manually rotate them to re-align with the road. Recommended to any 'GIS to Illustrator' user!