It took far longer than anticipated and far too long for anyone who was waiting for it to be released, especially after after all the false predictions about possible release dates in the past months. But here it is finally, the all new version, with lots of bug fixes, many new features and improvements, and finally proper CS4 support.

Many of the changes are under the hood and not visible straight away, but the more you work (and hopefully write code) with this new version, the more you will notice these improvements on all levels: A better structured and simplified API, syntax simplifications and improvements through tweaks to the Scripting Engine, a series of coding conventions that we will start writing about in tutorials, better structured documentation, etc. With this release we are only lying the base for many more improvements to come, and the more of the hard work is done, the more this becomes the actual fun-part of the project: Designing the architecture itself, coming up with conventions about how to make and use things in easy ways and communicating these, etc.

Several parts of the API have changed, so please do not expect your scripts written for previous versions to just work without some tweaks. We believe that the changes were worth the risk of breaking existing scripts, and we are willing to help with porting to the new version. As a start, we ported most of the scripts that users have uploaded to this site. Each script page still contains the original file, marked with -previous in the name.

We have prepared an extensive changelog with explanations about the API changes and how to adapt and use these.

We believe that this version was well worth the wait. But from now on, we will go back to a scheme of releasing often and early, to keep users in the loop as much as possible.

Since this question was raised twice on the forum now, here a post to inform everyone that things are moving on. CS4 support is on its way. The last release of Scriptographer is a long while back, and a bit buggy in many ways. In the meantime many of these bugs were fixed and many features added. We also changed the API in parts and therefore broke backward compatibility with existing scripts. The scripts will be easy enough to update, and the syntax got easier in many places.

It all ended up becoming a far longer transition than initially planed. The challenge now is to wrap this unfinished transition up a bit for a CS4 release soon, then finish the pending changes, and not mess everything up.

A preview version will be offered along with the current version, for backward compatibility until the transition to the new API is over.

Stay tuned and help out where you can.

Update: Only hours after the 2.0.024 release, 2.0.025 follows, with fixes for some newly introduced bugs. If you downloaded 2.0.024, please download again.

The long awaited version 2.0.024 of Scriptographer has finally been released.

It fixes many bugs that haunted the forum over the past weeks, among these:

- Memory leaks that lead to OutOfMemory exceptions
- Loading on Windows with Unicode characters in folder names
- Various text related bugs that caused text changes not to be reflected in the Scriptographer objects

And here some of the newly introduced features:

- Added new global objects: app, script, scriptographer
- Implemented script.onStart / script.onStop callback hooks
- Introduced script.preferences, an object where values can be persisted and retrieved from per script
- Dialog.prompt uses script.preferences internally to persist the last user entered values and remember these
- scriptographer.version, scriptographer.revision, app.version and app.revision can be used to check the version of Scriptographer and Illustrator
- Raster and PlacedItems can be created by passing a URL resource which is then loaded from the net

It also introduces some API changes. Read more about this in a dedicated forum post, and please post your reactions about the changes there too.

Just in time with Adobe's release of CS3, here the new version 2.0.023 of Scriptographer, that includes the latest bugfixes and finally runs on Intel Macs, but of course only if you have Illustrator CS3 installed there.

Download and test as much as you can.