Round Selected text with Polygon

Well, this one is really awesome! I was playing with finding positions of selected text, baseline and stuff, and I came to great idea! What if I want to draw polygon around selected text? Can it be done through scripting?! 😕 Well, I tried, and I think I was successful! 😀 It’s little bit complicated, but I learned a lot! So, let’s get started!

First, let’s grab active document, selection, also parent text frame, we will need frame geometric bounds later. Also, I added offset setting for increase and decrease size of final polygon. Let’s go through retrieving position of selected text. There few great text properties that allow us to retrieve bounds of selected text for example ‘horizontalOffset’ (The horizontal offset of the text), ‘endHorizontalOffset’ (Horizontal offset of the end of the text), ‘baseline’ (The vertical offset of the text), ‘endBaseline’ (Vertical offset of the end of the text), ‘ascent’ (The maximum ascent of any character in the text) and ‘descent’ (The maximum descent of any character in the text). So, with that properties retrieved form selected text, we calculate positions and create polygon. Script is not perfect, but it’s working 😀 and of course there is lot of space for improvements, so if you like this script, feel free to suggest 😉

var doc = app.activeDocument;
var sel = doc.selection[0];
var selOffset = 0.2;
var myFrame = sel.parentTextFrames[0];
var myFrameBounds = myFrame.geometricBounds;

var X_first = sel.horizontalOffset - selOffset;
var X_last = sel.endHorizontalOffset + selOffset;

var Y_top = sel.baseline - sel.ascent - selOffset;
var Y_bottom = sel.endBaseline + sel.descent + selOffset;

var roundSelectionPoints = Array();

  if(sel.lines.length == 1){
      roundSelectionPoints.push([X_first,Y_top]);
      roundSelectionPoints.push([X_last,Y_top]);
      roundSelectionPoints.push([X_last,Y_bottom]);
      roundSelectionPoints.push([X_first,Y_bottom]);
  }else{
      var Y_first = sel.lines[1].baseline - sel.ascent - selOffset;
      var Y_last = sel.lines[sel.lines.length-2].baseline + sel.descent + selOffset;

      roundSelectionPoints.push([X_first,Y_top]);
      roundSelectionPoints.push([myFrameBounds[3],Y_top]);
      roundSelectionPoints.push([myFrameBounds[3],Y_last]);
      roundSelectionPoints.push([X_last,Y_last]);
      roundSelectionPoints.push([X_last,Y_bottom]);
      roundSelectionPoints.push([myFrameBounds[1],Y_bottom]);
      roundSelectionPoints.push([myFrameBounds[1],Y_first]);
      roundSelectionPoints.push([X_first,Y_first]);
  }

var roundSelection = app.activeWindow.activePage.polygons.add();

roundSelection.sendBackward();
roundSelection.fillColor = app.activeDocument.swatches.item("Black");
roundSelection.fillTint = 25;
roundSelection.strokeWeight = 0;
roundSelection.paths.item(0).entirePath = roundSelectionPoints;

Well, that’s it, little messy 😀 Maybe, we can put polygon on separate layer, or anchor it to text or whatever we want to achieve!

Have fun! 😀