darklord

darklord ist a script for Adobe Illustrator that generates darkmode versions of your graphics based on a color mapping.

Installation

1. Move the darklord.js file into the Illustrator scripts directory. For example, on Mac OS X running Adobe Illustrator CC 2022, the path would be: // Adobe Illustrator CC 2022/Presets/en_US/Scripts/darklord.js
2. Create a custom color mapping by copying and adapting the darklord-colormap.json file from this repository.
3. Save the darklord-colormap.json file to the Illustrator scripts directory.
4. Restart Illustrator

Settings

There are several options to customize the script's behavior. darklord will read these settings from the ai2html settings text block.

• background_layer_name
  • The name of the layer containing the rectangle for the dark background
  • Possible values: any string
  • Default: darklord_bg
• darkmode_ab_prefix
  • A string that the generated darkmode artboards will be prefixed with
  • Possible values: any string
  • Default: dark-
• darkmode_background
  • A hex color code to set the color of the generated darkmode artwork's background
  • Possible values: #RRGGBB | #RGB
  • Default: #1F1E1C
• dynamic_colors
  • A boolean value specifying whether a color should be changed by a 180-degree hue rotation when no matching color is found in the mapping
  • Possible values: true | false
  • Default: false
• show_completion_dialog_box
  • A boolean value specifying whether a completion message will be displayed after script execution
  • Possible values: true | false
  • Default: true
• tolerance
  • A number indicating up to which degree of perceived visual deviation a color should be matched with a color from the mapping.
  • Possible values: any floating point number between 0 and 100
  • Default: 3

The tolerance value refers to the CIE Delta E 101 algorithm (learn more), which calculates a value between 0 and 100 indicating the perceived difference between two colors.

Delta E	Color difference
<= 1.0	Not perceptible by human eyes
>1.0 - 2.0	Perceptible through close observation
>2.0 - 10.0	Perceptible at a glance
>10	Perceived differently

Caveats

• Appearences (like multi-strokes and effects) are ignored by the script since Illustrator's scripting API gives no access to these styles. If a path has multiple strokes or fills, only the bottom-most stroke/fill is recolored.
• Graphs are not recolored since a graph's color cannot be accessed via Illustrator's scripting API.
• Gradients are currently not retouched by the script.
• Clipping masks must be re-applied manually in the darkmode artwork.

Thanks

Special thanks to Jakob Bauer / ZEIT ONLINE, Markus Ekholm, Sergey Osokin. Also thanks to Archie Tse and the other ai2html contributors at The New York Times Graphics Desk.

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Created by Ferdinand Kuchlmayr / DER SPIEGEL

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