3 replies to this topic

[Dennis McClendon]

From time to time, we all need to take a series of labels that we have in a text document (Word, Excel, or something similar) and bring them into an Illustrator map as individual labels. Imagine that you have the series of street names:

Third
Lexington
Park
Madison
Fifth

Has anyone thought of a clever way to bring those into an Illustrator file so they'd be separate labels that could then be dragged to the appropriate streets?

[Nick H]

Export the labels from Word as a PDF. Open your map in AI in and then open the PDF with the labels. With the labels on the screen do CTRL-A, CTRL-C. Then click the map tab and go CTRL-V. This works.

Its amazing that AI won't let you import files.

Regards, N.

[frax]

Dennis - the amazing John Wundes has a javascript to the rescue for you - just copy/paste the text into a textframe, and then run his DivideTextFrame script. Voilá!

[Matthew Hampton]

Dennis - the amazing John Wundes has a javascript to the rescue for you - just copy/paste the text into a textframe, and then run his DivideTextFrame script. Voilá!

That looks like a great script.

It would be interesting to try and tweak the "verticalTolerance" variable for Maplex street label exports in order to try and join broken baselines - but presently the script is only intended for individual lines of horizontal text.

This copied from script
// If a selected text anchors vertical coordinate is different,
// the text areas are assumed to be sequential lines,


We need someone to define instances of X and Y coordinate differentiation (as well as rotation) for cartographic use. This would be awesome to to have for Maplex generated labeling that is not all horizontal.