Illustrator text frames -- identifying whether or not text overflows

Using Applescript with Adobe Illustrator, is there a way to identify whether or not the text within a given text frame is overflowing (and thus displaying the red box with the plus sign in it), as opposed to a text frame that isn’t?

Hi there,

Had a look through the Illustrator dictionary to see if there was anything but couldn’t find anything.
Then did a quick test with Illustrator and a small script to get the properties of a text box etc, but nothing.

Did think of one approach though slightly long winded.

Draw a text box maybe just off the page and name it ‘overmatter_test’ for example.
Loop through every text box linking it to the text box ‘overmatter_test’.
Check the contents of the test box to see if it contains anything. If it does, then it’s the probably the overmatter from the linked text box, therefore the linked text box must have had overmatter in it (in theory!).

You’ll probably need to clear the contents of the test box before linking the next one to it.

Not had chance to code that solution, thought I’d suggest it though.

Nick

Nick, I think what you say is one of 2 possible solutions for Illustrator. There is now property to check. Im almost certain that ‘contents’ = the characters that fit within the frame. So you could resize check the string and put back. too.

You can count the number of characters of the frame, which will include overset, and compare it with the count for all the lines in the frame, which will exclude overset.

I know this is an old post, but Shane’s method works a treat! You just have to add the number of returns to the character count line by line otherwise every frame will come up as overset.

Get the count for all the lines in the frame:

set testLength to length of lines of text frame 1 of document 1