ScanCCFonts

A cross-platform Adobe Illustrator ExtendScript that solves a major friction point in graphic design workflows: forcing Adobe Creative Cloud to sync active fonts across different computers.

When you work across multiple machines (e.g., a desktop and a laptop, or collaborating with another designer), Adobe CC doesn't always automatically activate the fonts used in a project unless they are explicitly embedded or heavily referenced.

This script scans your local Creative Cloud font cache and generates a "dummy" Illustrator document containing a text frame for every currently synced Adobe Font. By saving this .ai file and opening it on your target machine, Creative Cloud will immediately detect the missing fonts and trigger an auto-sync.

Features

• Cross-Platform: Works seamlessly on both macOS and Windows.
• Auto-Scaling: Dynamically calculates the artboard height based on the number of fonts you have installed. No clipping or overlapping text frames.
• Graceful Fallbacks: If the script detects a font in your local Adobe cache that isn't currently active in Illustrator, it will still generate a text frame for it, but color it gray to indicate its inactive status.
• Typographic Accuracy: Forces 100% horizontal and vertical scaling to prevent Illustrator's point-text bounding box from stretching or squishing the typeface.

Installation

To make the script easily accessible, place the ScanCCFonts.jsx file into your Illustrator scripts folder.

Windows

Copy ScanCCFonts.jsx to: C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Illustrator [Year]\Presets\en_US\Scripts\

macOS

Copy ScanCCFonts.jsx to: /Applications/Adobe Illustrator [Year]/Presets.localized/en_US/Scripts/

Note: You may need to restart Illustrator after placing the file in this directory.

Usage

1. Open Adobe Illustrator.
2. Go to File > Scripts > ScanCCFonts. (If you didn't install it in the presets folder, select Other Script... and locate the file).
3. The script will run and automatically generate a new document titled "CC Font Collection".
4. Save this document as a standard .ai file.
5. Transfer the .ai file to your target computer and open it. Adobe CC will prompt you to activate the missing fonts.

How it Works Under the Hood

Adobe CC stores synced fonts in hidden directories rather than your system's main font folder. This script reads the XML manifest file generated by the Creative Cloud desktop app to identify every font you have access to.

• Windows Path: %APPDATA%\Adobe\CoreSync\plugins\livetype\
• macOS Path: ~/Library/Application Support/Adobe/CoreSync/plugins/livetype/

It cross-references this manifest with Illustrator's active app.textFonts object, applying a normalization regex to match PostScript names to display names, ensuring maximum accuracy when generating the preview frames.

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License. See LICENSE for details.

Built with ❤️ by tandukuda

⭐ Star this repo • ☕ Ko-Fi