How to do "arrange in rectangular grid" operation like inkscape in illustrator

Question

Inkscape has a very convenient arrange feature that can arrange existing objects into rectangular array and setting explicitly the horizontal or vertical spacing between objects.

For example, I randomly draw some rectangular like this in inkscape

then I select all objects, and set arrange panel

and I got perfectly

in a single click the Arrange botton

I cannot find the same Arrange feature in illustrator. So I want to know how to do same operations as inkscape can do in illustrator?

Answer 1

There is no such thing in Illustrator*. You can however use the align panels distribute function one row at a time then group rows and and distribute the rows in row direction.

Or you could just script this not a big deal, good first script IMHO.

#target illustrator

placeInGridC(activeDocument.selection, 3, 100, 100);

function placeInGridC (items, ncols, xfst, yfst)
{
    for(var i=0;i<items.length;i++)
    {
        var j = i%ncols;        
        var k = (i-j) / ncols;

        items[i].position = [
             xfst * j - items[i].width  / 2,
            -yfst * k + items[i].height / 2
        ];
    }

}

* Assuming 2 applications have the same feature set is just wrong. IF they did what would be the purpose of having 2 applications?