patharea plugin for Adobe Illustrator

Patharea computes area and length of selected paths.

Self-intersecting paths and compound paths are not handled. If overlapping paths are measured, the result is the sum of separate areas, not the apparent area. In area calculations, open paths are implicitly closed by a straight segment from end point to start point (this is the same as fill rule for open paths).

Building the plugin from source

The Illustrator Source Development Kit (SDK) must be obtained from Adobe.

Two required projects must be checked out using Subversion:

svn checkout http://www.telegraphics.com.au/svn/common/trunk common
svn checkout http://telegraphics.com.au/svn/pathlength/branches/patharea

Building for Macintosh

For Illustrator versions 7, 8, 9, 10 and CS, MPW (Macintosh Programmer's Workshop) can be used to build the plugin. MPW runs on PowerPC systems, MacOS 9 or earlier, or in the Classic runtime environment available in OS X 10.4 or earlier.

Change current directory to the "patharea" source directory.
Use MPW's Build Program: patharea

(CodeWarrior may also be used to build some varieties of Macintosh plugin, but this is not recently tested.)

For Illustrator CS2 (PPC), CS3 (PPC+Intel) and CS4 (PPC+Intel), OS X and Apple's are required. The plugin is built with gcc, by the provided Makefile.

Change current directory to the "patharea" source directory.

make osx builds a single-architecture plugin on PowerPC, for CS2 only.

make fat builds a dual-architecture plugin (PPC+Intel), for CS3 and CS4.

The result is a plugin bundle, "patharea_osx.aip".

Building for Windows

The plugin can be built with the freely downloadable Visual C++ Express CLI tools.

Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Express Editions with SP1
You may also need to install the Windows SDK for Windows Server 2008 and .NET Framework 3.5.

An NMAKE Makefile is provided to make this possible.

Change current directory to the "patharea" source directory.
At command prompt, nmake /f nmake.mak builds the Win32 (x86) plugin, "patharea.aip".

This has been tested with Visual C++ Express Edition 2008 and the Adobe Illustrator CS4 SDK. (Note that this configuration also works under WINE, in Linux.)

Still confused, or having trouble?

Don't hesitate to write to us.