TextSync plugin

Description

With the TextSync plugin, you can export all text objects or only the selected ones, either point text or area text. The tab-delimited text file it creates can then be opened in a word processor or spreadsheet for editing. If each text object contains a bold head, italic subhead, and description, your spreadsheet would show each callout as a row. The first column can be ignored by the editor, as it contains the XMLID of the text object the text belongs to. The next column would be the bold head, then the italic subhead, then the description. Tabs and returns from the text objects are indicated by “<t>” or “<r>” markup and can be freely added to or removed from the text.

When the text is imported back into the Illustrator document, the plugin first locates the text object with the item’s corresponding XMLID. Then the object’s text is divided into blocks based on its character formatting, and replaced with the blocks of text extracted using the same method.

If there is no corresponding XMLID, all format blocks in the text are combined and a new point text object is created in the visible document view.