Paste without duplicate color swatches transferring over in InDesign

Just wild guessing, but, what effect does turning these Preferences off or on have on the document?

1. Preferences > General > When Placing or Pasting Content > Allow Incoming Spot Color to Replace Existing Swatch of Same Name

2. Preferences > Clipboard Handling > Clipboard > Prefer PDF When Pasting as well as Copy PDF to Clipboard (maybe turn both off as a test?)

And further:

3. Did any object content that is exhibiting this behavior get copy n pasted from Illustrator originally?

4. And in the case of the user who was working with templates as originating file: Did the user begin by first Save-As to an InDesign document?

5. And in the case of the user who was working with swatches in sub-folders: Does the problem persist if the Swatch is not in a grouped subfolder?

6. What color model was the template versus the color model of the working file?

These are all just troubleshooting guesses, of course. I don't believe I have ever seen this happen in projects I have operated, so I am just asking rough ideas.

I've been dealing with this issue even within the same document. I'm not copying or pasting in from another document, I'm copying things between pages and my swatches panel keeps duplicating colors and appending them as 2, 3, 4, etc. It's really annoying and I'd love to know how to stop the madness. Thanks!

I have this exact same problem. I am copying objects with assigned colours, e.g., "Grey_Light" from a client's brand guidelines and adding them to a new artwork project I have created and each time I am doing so the numbering is increasing, i.e., "Grey_Light 1", "Grey_Light 2", "Grey_Light 3", etc. All objects and text are process colours, not spot.

Additionally, I'm finding that some black tints (30%, 60%, 90%, etc.) with the naming convention are converting to full CMYK breakdown, not just Black.

If it isn't custom named and has a CMYK colour value, it isn't a problem.

I seem to recall this is a setting that you decide on when you first install indesign.

I can't find where to change this setting after the fact tho.

As Bill suggests if colors in two different docs are named the same, but have different color definitions the color gets duplicated with an appended name when you paste.

If you are using OSX this AppleScript will paste and prevent the duplication. The incoming color is defined with the destination document's color:

(* 
Rob Day 2015-2018 
When pasting an object with a conflicting color swatch changes the incoming swatch to match the document swatch
*)
tell application "Adobe InDesign CC 2018"
    
    --get the list of document swatches before the paste
    set currentColors to name of every swatch of active document
    paste
    
    tell active document
        --get a new list which would include duplicates
        set newColors to name of every swatch
        
        --find the duplicates and merge with the original
        repeat with i from 1 to number of items in newColors
            set c to item i of newColors
            --the duplicate has a space + 2 added to its name so get its name minus 2 characters
            if c is not in currentColors then
                set mergename to characters 1 thru ((count of characters of c) - 2) of c as string
                --merge with the original swatch
                try
                    merge swatch mergename with swatch c
                end try
            end if
        end repeat
    end tell
end tell

Are the colors you're using PANTONE colors taken from the same color libraries? Are the color settings used for each document the same (Edit>Color Settings...)? If the colors are ones that you've created have you checked to see if their CMYK or RGB breakdowns are identical?

Hi Jim,

Sorry to hear about this. I tried the same thing at my end but I was unable to replicate this issue. Would you mind sharing the exact workflow?

In addition to this, I would also suggest you to reset preferences for InDesign: Set preferences in Adobe InDesign

Regards,

Srishti