Darty-Ai Workflow Part 1 – Tags

1. Preparing a tagged template document, using Adobe® Illustrator® and the Darty-Ai UI.
2. Preparing a data source, using the Darty-Ai UI and / or your favored spreadsheet software like Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets.
3. Previewing and exporting the documents using the Darty-Ai UI.

In this post, we are going to focus on the concept of tagging the documents’ objects and how to
refer to the objects using the tags in the data document. With Darty-Ai one can manipulate not only objects, but you can also change artboards, layers, and parts of text frames too, we will leave those to part 2 of the post and just discuss the tagging of regular Illustrator page items. There are two ways of tagging objects, one can click on the items using one of Illustrators selection tools, if you are tagging parts of a group then the group selection tool can be particularly useful, another useful tool for selection is the CoolSelection™ plugin. The other way of tagging objects is to enter names in the layers panel and then click a button and the tags will automatically be assigned to the page items, one can also click a button to have the layers panel name objects as per their tags. Feel free to use a combination of the methods.

• If we want to search for all the objects labeled brown then we simply enter brown as the search string, click the button and look at the animals. For fish we enter fish This is the simplest form of tag search string. You can get by with Darty-Ai happily just knowing this one simple search string rule.
• Let’s say we want to do something a bit more complex and we want to search for all the objects labeled either brown or fish, we need to use the | “or” symbol brown | fish.
• If we want all objects that are tagged both brown and horse, we need to use the & “and” symbol brown & horse, this can be a wee bit confusing to the layman who might think that this should select both brown tagged objects and horse tagged objects, it does not it selects objects tagged with both the brown and horse.
• If we want all objects that are not tagged, we need to use the ! “not” symbol !brown.
• If we want all objects that are tagged brown but not horse, we need to use the & ! “and not” symbols brown & !horse.

• What do you think that (brown | gray & fish) & big will select? 🤔 You really don’t have to use these complex ones, we’re just demoing to show what you can do if you want to! 🤓
• We’ll be adding more really geeky examples soon and some pracitcal cases when you might want to use them, stay tuned.