Thanks, Mark. That makes sense. However, when I search all the paths in the document there are none that have a true clipping property. My suspicion is that the bounding square is just that, a square drawn by the qr code api as a frame around the code. You got me thinking though. I figured out that I can identify the relevant path simply by it's dimensions and then delete it. So here's the new sticking point: I don't think the Illustrator object model allows for interrogating path items within a group, i.e., you have to iterate through all the pathitems in the document. Ideailly, I'd like to be able to look at only the paths within the QR code, which I add to the document as a placed item... which Illustrator treats as a group. This document has tens of thousands of paths and so looping through all of the them to find the 50 QR codes would be super inefficient. What do you think? Is there a way to iterate through just the paths in a placeditem/group?
RE VB vs. JS, I can write in both but there are a lot of reasons I'm using VB on this project. The main reasons are that the customer is using Excel for data internally and Excel VBA is a really strong VBA object model. I've also written more than 500,000 lines of the stuff in my career so I'm pretty comfortable solving complex problems with it. Also, the IDE and the run-time debugging engine is oh so great for rooting out the nasties. :-)
