Expert: Kevin Stohlmeyer - 4/22/2008

Question
I'm hoping you can help me out with this as it's driving me nuts. Basically I'm trying to batch an action I made in CS3 to run on about 700 illustrator files.

Everything runs just fine and dandy until I switch from Illustrator to another program (Firefox, photoshop, bridge, anything other than illustrator), once illustrator is no longer the active window, the batch process stops. When I make illustrator the active window again, the batch starts again.

This is a huge pain as I can't work on anything else while keeping the batch running in the background.

Here's the nitty gritty details:
XP SP2, Illustrator CS3, smoking fast machine

Action was created in actions palette to do the following:
Unlock All > Select All > Create Outlines > Convert to Grayscale

Ran the batch via the actions palette, choose "Save and Close" and "log errors to a file".

I've restarted Illustrator, restarted the machine, recreated the action, broke the folder into smaller folders with less files. It's making my Tuesday feel like a Monday.

I've search all over and found nothing. There was one post on the adobe forums, but it was from October and it never got answered. This worked perfect in CS2, if you have a solution you will be my hero!

Thanks!

Answer
Hi Scott,

PCs sometimes require Illustrator to be in the foreground to run certain actions. Not sure why yours would though, it seems simple enough.

Try this:

Go to Bridge and direct it to your folder. Select the files (select all). Then go to Tools>Illustrator>Automate>Batch and select your batch and see if it still requires IL to be open.

If it doesn't work, there is no way to work around this unfortunately. My suggestion is to run this over lunch, or start it at night before you leave.

Sorry

Kevin