Illustrator: Turn Off Artboard Junk

By ian | Published: December 3, 2009

illustratorIllustrator CS4 has artboards. All well and good. However, the amount of information that these things are festooned with defies belief – it’s like being in the cockpit of a Stealth Bomber. OK I’m exaggerating (slightly) but this script kills the cross hairs, safe areas, and center markers on all your artboards, in one fell swoop.

Here’s a demonstration. Double click for full screen – if you dare.

Download Turn-off-artboard-junk.rb.zip

Source code follows.

#!/usr/bin/ruby

# rb-appscript code by Ian Haigh : http://ianhaigh.com/
# Fri Dec  4 11:51:04 EST 2009

require "rubygems"
require "appscript"

ai = Appscript.app("Adobe Illustrator")

doc = ai.current_document

doc.artboards.get.each do |artboard|
	artboard.show_cross_hairs.set(false)
	artboard.show_safe_areas.set(false)
	artboard.show_center.set(false)
end
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  • What’s this all about then?

    rb-appscript is a powerful way to automate your Mac. It's similar to Applescript but it's built in Ruby, which means you get to leverage that language's powerful syntax and libraries. Giving you more time to make toasted sandwiches. You want long-winded explanations? We got those.

    Please note that these scripts are by no means bulletproof, and are intended to provide examples of application scripting. I take no resposibility for any loss of data or mishaps; you download and run everything at your own risk. That said, I use all of these scripts in a production environment every day (well – more accurately, I use some of these scripts in a production environment most days).