Merge Point Text Objects Into One Text Area In Illustrator

Question

After importing from PDF I have several single line point text objects which I want to convert to one multiline text area object.

Currently I have several lines of text represented as separate point text objects:

I want to have one text area for the whole paragraph:

Also I would like to automate this somehow, since I have about 40 of these paragraph of texts in my graphic, so I don't need select and merge all of them manually:

PS: I'm aware about copy and paste solution (selecting multiple text objects), but it doesn't work for me, because it's a lot of manual work.

Answer 1

Ajar Productions has a script called Merge Text that does mostly what you want, except it turns the text into a big point text. You may need to adjust spacing after this tough as the script toolset is a bit simplistic.

Illustrator Praxis has a set of text tools that can do this with a little more work. For one they have a script to turn point texts into textboxes. This script set is a bit more complex but allows for so many more situations such as lines broken by kerning etc.

As a alternate option, Hiroyuki Sato has implemented a nice workaround for situations like this. He has a script called batchTextEdit.jsx that will allow you to conveniently edit the texts as if they were in same textbox.

Answer 2

This other similar QA has an answer that really helped me:

If you'd like to merge broken text while preserving as much of the formatting, placement, paragraphs and other typography of the existing text as you can, rather than pasting into a newly created text area as plain text, you can try John Wundes' amazing Join Text Frames script.

It does exactly what it says on the tin: it merges snippets of text into one snippet of text, by making intelligent judgements based on where they are relative to each other:

• It merges adjascent text snippets (e.g. from broken lines of text from PDFs) into single lines, with some control offered over how close is considered to be the same line.
• It merges separate lines of text into one multi-line text object with the text in the right order (top to bottom), fixing broken paragraphs.
• There's then an option to restore the original formatting of all the merged text. This can take a while, but it helpfully gives you pretty accurate estimates of how long it will take and the option to skip if it's not worth it.