Illustrator Scripting in Visual Studio Code

JT Nimoy
8 min readApr 6, 2020

Intro

Welcome to the second tutorial in the series. This tutorial takes what we learned in my first illustrator scripting tutorial and brings you further along. In the last session, we used Adobe’s Extendscript Toolkit (ESTK) and since those years, Adobe have begun archiving their own little coding app in favor of using Microsoft Visual Studio Code but you have to enable some extensions. After guiding you through that installation, we will test the basic feedback between the apps, then go into some example technique mini-projects, just to work on our Illustrator Scripting. Adobe’s move to a proper code editor is favorable for a few reasons. The ESTK app was too much of a chore to keep up, and was essentially reinventing the wheel anyway.

Installing Visual Studio Code

Visual Studio Code is free and available for several platforms. Download it here. “Visual Studio Code” not the same as “Visual Studio” (the one Unity likes).

When you launch Visual Studio Code, you might feel overwhelmed by the amount of stuff already there to meet you. For now, just choose the menu:

View > Extensions

--

--

JT Nimoy

Creative Technologist Multiracial Queer Trans Womxn of Color, with negative levels of privilege.