Working with enumeration values

Properties that use enumeration values in VBScript use a numeral rather than a text value. For example, the Orientation property of the TextFrame object specifies whether text content in the text frame is horizontal or vertical. The property uses the aiTextOrientation enumeration, which has two possible values, aiHorizontal and aiVertical.

To find the numeral values of enumerations, use either of the following:

  • The object browser in your scripting editor environment. See Viewing the VBScript object model.

  • The Adobe lllustrator CC 2017 Scripting Reference: VBScript, which lists the numeral values directly after the constant value in the “Enumerations” chapter at the end of the book. The following example is from that table:

Enumeration type

Values

What it means

AiTextOrientation

aiHorizontal = 0 aiVertical = 1

The orientation of text in a text frame

The following sample specifies vertical text orientation

Set appRef = CreateObject ("Illustrator.Application")
Set docRef = appRef.Documents.Add
Set textRef = docRef.TextFrames.Add
textRef.Contents = "This is some text content."
textRef.Left = 50
textRef.Top = 700
textRef.Orientation = 1

Generally, it is considered good scripting practice to place the text value in a comment following the numeral value, as in the following sample statement:

textRef.Orientation = 1 ' aiVertical