How to convert text to vector glyphs

Script for converting text to vector glyphsI bought a great Path Type – Single Stroke Glyph Set from Sam Jones (Sivioco), but I was too lazy to put together the text from the glyph letters. So instead of spending few minutes on playing with letters, I spent few hours with programming a script, that will do it for me. Maybe there are more designers, that will appreciate this script, so you can download it for free and use it in your work.

Download the script here: text2glyph.zip

How it works

You must have some vector alphabet (glyph letters) in your document – each letter must be a single object or a group named “letter-a”, “letter-A”, “letter-b”, … as you see it is case sensitive (this is important). Of course, that you can have only upper or lower case letters, it is up to you and your alphabet.

Example of vector glyph alphabet

Once all your alphabet letters have a proper name, you can create any text object (single line, or multiline), select it and run my script text2glyph.jsx. (just use menu item File / Scripts / Other Script… and select the script file text2glyph.jsx). Script will try to find a glyph for every your letter in selected text object and put it on the edge of your artboard. Script will automatically create a new layer for all converted text letters (duplicated glyphs) – sometimes it can took a little bit longer, depends on the amount of objects in your document.

Here is the result – I run the script on the TEST text field:

named-letters2

Maybe it sounds too complicated, check this video instead:

Script was developed on Adobe Illustrator CS5, but it works fine on Adobe CC too.

Do you like the script?

Share it to others. Write some comment or a suggestion for the next version.

3 Comments

  1. SO, for this to work I shall rename groups that are single letters, but what if they’re symbols? Will it work?

    Let me know, please – and thanks for sharing this with me on Behance :)

    Cheers,

    Ivan

    1. Hi Ivan, thanks for a good question. All letters must be on the artboard, and in the layers palette, each letter (either as a group of layers or just a layer / sublayer) must have a specific name “letter-a”, “letter-b”. Just tray it and you will see, if you have any problem, send me some sample .ai file (in version adobe CS5 please).

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