How to apply alternating color fills to a text in Illustrator?

Question

I'm trying to follow along an Illustrator tutorial on how to personalize a label. In it, the brand's name uses two colors that are applied alternately to each letter. See below image:

The text "haus wine" is made using the type tool. It can still be edited to whatever text I want to. So it hasn't been converted to shape or anything like that.

My question is: Is there a way to select alternating characters that are created using the type tool so I can fill it with a color without affecting the characters in between? From the example above, if I want to fill the letter h, u, i and e with the light yellow fill, without affecting the letter a, s, w, and n, I would have to do it individually on each letter. It would be nice to be able to do a multiple select when we're in type tool mode. Hope this makes sense.

Answer 1

I think you could split Selected Words Into Characters using a script-as suggested in the comments.

Copy that text before you run the script if you want to keep the original text.

The Adobe community has a thread about it: (https://community.adobe.com/t5/illustrator/how-to-divide-all-textframes-in-one-character-per-textframe/td-p/3205429?page=1)

The script divides the text and we can select each character as individuals characters.

Here is the script:

#target Illustrator
//  script.name = splitSelectedWordsIntoCharacters.jsx;
//  script.description = splits selected texFrames into separate characters;
//  script.required = select point text textFrames before running;
//  script.parent = CarlosCanto;  // 4/13/11
//  script.elegant = false;
var idoc = app.activeDocument;
var sel = idoc.selection; // get selection
var selCount = sel.length; // count items
var tWord = []; // to hold the textFrames

for (j=selCount ; j>0 ; j--) // loop thru selection & get 
textFrames backwards
{
    tWord[j-1] = sel[j-1];
}


for (k = 0 ; k<tWord.length ; k++) // loop thru textFrames
{
    var xpos = tWord[k].position[0]; // get x
    var ypos = tWord[k].position[1]; // get y
    var charCount = tWord[k].characters.length; // count characters

    for (i=charCount-1 ; i>=0 ; i--) // loop thru characters backwards
        {
            var ichar = tWord[k].duplicate(); // duplicate textFrame
            ichar.contents = tWord[k].characters[i].contents; // get last character
            tWord[k].characters[i].remove(); // remove last character from original word
            var width = tWord[k].width; // get the new width (without the last character)
            ichar.position = [xpos+width,ypos]; // position the character = original position + new width
        }
    
    tWord[k].remove(); // remove textFrame (it is empty by now)

}