Warning: this is an unorganized, unedited, angry rant written on the back of several very long days and nights of work.
Lately, I have been using illustrator a lot for work, creating vectorized maps for use in an HMI application, and I am nearly the end of my patience. One particularly painful element of my current project involves turning bitmap diagrams of several enormously complicated networks of conveyor systems into vectorized maps for use in a GIS-like application (building said application is the other part of the project). I've written a ton of computer vision code to do the first few big passes, but anything that can't be automated away has to be done by hand, plus they all must be validated by hand. These maps each consist of hundreds of overlapping tracks consisting of thousands of individual segments. Long story short, scripting is at the heart of the way I interact with Illustrator.
and let me tell you: it sucks. horribly.
Adobe laid their gaze on javascript and said "let's use this as the central scripting language for all of our software, but first, let's undertake a seemingly impossible task: make this joke of a language even worse". To add insult to injury, they didn't document the APIs for their specific applications at all. The best that is avaliable are websites put together by other people who've walked this path before. Whatever cursed javascript engine they're using doesn't seem to keep track of prototypes, because if you ask the interpreter what type an object is, the answer is always [object], but if you use instanceof, it works fine.
Okay, fine. Lots of reverse-engineering by logging, right? WRONG. There is no built in logging mechanism. Online tutorials will tell you to log things by creating text objects on the active document in Illustrator. Fortunately, I figured out that alert() works (for some reason), so I wrote a very small logging framework around that.
There is supposedly a VSCode extension for this, but I have had zero success with it after hours of trying. Maybe it's my sub-legal installation of Illustrator, maybe it's just broken. My money is on the latter.
On a related note, Illustrator sucks so badly out of the box. You have to purchase third-party plugins that cost >5x more than the application itself to make it usable. Isn't this the industry standard? Selection of anything is horrific; I feel like I am defusing a bomb whenever I try to select a path point or curve handle.
This isn't for a lack of experience or knowledge of the software. Due of this project, I know every keybind, shortcut, menu, dialog box, and quirk of Illustrator. It's terrible all the way through. I hate Adobe Illustrator with every fiber of my being.
Yes, I know about Inkscape and use it extensively in my personal life, but due to some incredibly esoteric format requirements [specifically regarding SVG output] and license limitations, I'm stuck with Adobe.
