How to select all visible text-elements and make them separate variables?

Question

I want to translate a huge amount of illustrations from Illustrator. The Variable-Tool offers a great opportunity to transform text into XML that can be read by translation software and re-imported into Illustrator after editing to replace all texts.

The problem: there is no way to make all visible text-elements in an illustration a separate variable. So it's a tedious process to select each text and click on "make variable".

I would need a script that:

• checks all visible texts;
• makes each element a separate variable;
• optionally: automatically starts "save dataset" in order to save the variable.

Is there any script like this? Or could anyone help in producing something like this?

Answer 1

Have you looked up the VariableImporter script? You can start with a .csv spreadsheet and it can automatically create your variables based on the art's name inside the layers panel. There's even an accompanying "rename art from text" script which makes this process even faster. Check out the script repository here.