A collection of scripts and documents for Photoshop scripting in JavaScript (and JSON), written/created by Michel MARIANI (aka “Mikaeru”) and originally published on Tonton Pixel’s Blog (www.tonton-pixel.com) under the GNU General Public License (GPL) v3.
Mariani has documented in detail the specifications of many of Photoshop saved files formats (actions, custom shapes, gradients, and styles files) and written an impressive JS/JSON library to parse and manipulate them.
Unfortunately, in the past Tonton Pixel’s Blog has been unreachable for a long time, and the only way I was able to visit the website (and retrive material) was via WaybackMachine—also, the only means of contacting the author was a contact-form, also unreachable.
Since this precious GPL lincensed material didn’t appear anywhere else on the web, I thought of “salvaging” it by sharing it here on GitHub. It will most definitely provide a good source of inspiration for anyone wishing to write some Photoshop-related software, especially the well written “unofficial” documentation on PS files specs—which, to my knowledge, is not to be found elsewhere.
Soon after publishing this repository, Michel Mariani discovered it and contacted me via email—a fortunate event which allowed me to get in contact with him and also brought to his attention the problem regarding the non-reachability of the blog, thus prompting an intervention on Tonton Pixel’s Blog, which is now reachable again.
Please, note that subsequently to the creation of this project, Michel Mariani has created (April 2018) his own GitHub repository of the Tonton Pixel website material, called JSON Photoshop Scripting:
The repository contains all the original—and unaltered—zip archives found on Tonton Pixel’s website download section, along with the material downloaded from its “documentation” section.
All materials are copyrighted © 2011-2014 by Michel MARIANI, all script files are open-source, and licensed by MARIANI under the GNU General Public License (GPL) v3.
All documents downloaded from Tonton Pixel’s website are placed inside the “Documentation” folder. There are five documents in total (in PDF and HTML format):
- Photoshop Actions File Format
- Photoshop Custom Shapes File Format
- Photoshop Gradients File Format
- Photoshop Styles File Format
- Decision table for conflicting StringIDs in Photoshop (PDF).
All scripts downloaded from Tonton Pixel’s website are placed inside the “Scripts” folder.
Scripts fall into two main categories:
- Creative Scripts JavaScript creative scripts for Adobe Photoshop, making use of the scripting library.
- Utility Scripts JavaScript utility scripts for Adobe Photoshop, making use of the scripting library.
All of the scripts contained in these two categories are stand-alone scripts, making use of the ”JSON Action Manager” scripting library.
Central to this Photoshop scripting project, are two components, each one located in its own folder:
In Mariani’s words:
“JSON Action Manager” is an open-source scripting library for Adobe Photoshop, written in JavaScript, and licensed using GPLv3. It allows developers to interact with the underlying Action Manager using a simpler JSON AM Data Format (please refer also to the JSON Project Introduction page to get more information).
What is called “JSON Action Manager” is basically a set of interrelated modules defining global variables acting as namespaces…
“JSON Action Toolbox” is a developer-oriented set of automation plug-ins for Adobe Photoshop running on Mac OS X, and is distributed as Freeware. It is basically a combination of a “JSON Event Listener” and “JSON Property Getter” modules, with several improvements over the original sample versions coming with the SDK…
All the scripts are organized in a folders structure mirroring the original grouping by Mariani. Each zip-archived library comes with a rich (JSDoc generated) API documentation in HTML format, and with example/test scripts.
For more documents by Michel Mariani on the subject, I strongly advice to visit Tonton Pixel’s Blog:
- Tonton Pixel’s Blog Home
If for any reason the above link is unreachable, try via WaybackMachine.
Especially, I advise to further read the articles linked below (which I didn’t include in this repo since it wasn’t clear if they were too under GPL license, and I haven’t yet managed to contact the author):
If you are interested in contributing to this repository, please read the CONTRIBUTING.md file for more info.
- 2016/01/23 — Initial Commit.
- 2016/02/18 — Tonton Pixel Blog became available again:
- Re-downloaded HTML version of Documentation.
- Substituted links to Wayback Machine with direct links to Tonton Pixel Blog in various MD files.