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Participating Frequently
April 6, 2017
Answered

Resolving color name conflicts when combining ID documents

  • April 6, 2017
  • 2 replies
  • 1320 views

Hi,

I use an ID template document (.indt) when building layouts for my individual magazine articles. In the colors pallet are colors named "Article primary accent" and "Article secondary accent" (as well as a plethora of custom stock colors that remain fixed). The primary and secondary accent colors make it easy to use other preset styles with these colors applied. E.G. then when I'm ready to set a color 'mood' for the document, all I need to do is change the color definition, and then all my titles, sub-headers, page numbers, table rows, box borders, etc. switch to the new color automatically. Makes sense?

We use a separate ID document for each article so that different editors can work on different parts of the magazine at different times.

Now I want to try using the Publish Online feature to create a HTML version of the whole magazine. That requires assembling all articles into a single ID document. This is a bit clunky with section start, page numbering, and LH vs RH page idiosyncrasies...but doable.

However, I'm running into color naming conflicts when combining documents to assemble the full magazine in ID. "Article primary accent" from later articles is getting reset to the color definition of the color used in the initial (first article) starting document. I am not getting a color name conflict warning dialog box like I get if copy/pasting and object from one layout to another. It seems like dragging pages from one document's Pages pallet into a second document (the right way to combine/add pages, right?) does not recognize that there are 2 colors with the same name.

Am I missing something? Is there a better way of doing this? Is there a non-tedious way of hard-coding color definitions so documents can be combined?

Thanks,

Ben

    This topic has been closed for replies.
    Correct answer rob day

    Thanks Rob,

    So it's actually a style issue, not a color issue. The style isn't smart enough to stay linked to the original color, as that color's name gets updated in the destination document. Seems like they developed half a solution (swatch naming), but forgot to apply it deeply enough into the structure (styles). Damn.

    I am interested in your script to append all color names. But I know nothing about writing scripts. Is this something that I would run for each document prior to opening it? Or?

    My concern though, is that this would help the color issue, but not any of the other Style changes that occurred between the documents. E.G. if I changed the definition of "Paragraph sub heading" in other ways than just color, (EG font, size, leading, etc.) those changes will be overridden during by the destination document Style settings. Right? There is a way to "Break link to style", but you have to individually select each object/paragraph/character...It can't be applied globally to the document.

    Can scripts be written to append the names of Object Styles, Paragraph Styles,  and Character Styles as well as Swatches? Who can do this kind of voodoo?

    Ben


    What OS are you on?

    A swatch renaming script is fairly simple. Here it is as AppleScript (OSX only):

    -------------------------------------------------

    tell application "Adobe InDesign CC 2014"

        tell active document

            set s to every swatch

            set n to name

            set n to "-" & (characters 1 thru -6) of n as string

            repeat with x in s

                try

                    set sn to name of x

                    set name of x to sn & n

                end try

            end repeat

        end tell

    end tell

    Here's my swatch panel after running it on a document named April. I'm not sure if there is a character limit for swatch naming, so you might have to consider that.

    My concern though, is that this would help the color issue, but not any of the other Style changes that occurred between the documents. E.G. if I changed the definition of "Paragraph sub heading"

    When you rename a swatch any styles that use the swatch are automatically update, so I don't think that would be a problem

    2 replies

    rob day
    Community Expert
    rob dayCommunity Expert
    Community Expert
    April 7, 2017

    I don't think what you are describing should be happening. What version of ID are you using? You might expect that behavior if the documents were part of a Book file and the swatches were set to synchronize.

    When you drag and drop to combine pages, swatches with same names but different values should get appended. Like this where I've dragged the page on the right into the doc on the left and the swatch AccentColor gets renamed to AccentColor2:

    H
    Home PowerAuthor
    Participating Frequently
    April 7, 2017

    Thanks for the reply Rob,

    I'm running CC2017 now. Some of the layouts I'm trying to combine are from CC2015, But I just tried doing a Save-As to update the source layout before dragging pages to the "build" layout. No help.

    I did just run a test by creating a new object with the color definition in question. In the new (combined) doc, that color was moved/added as "Article Primary Accent 2" and the new object maintained it's proper color. This is what you were predicting. However, the objects that are improperly defaulting to the wrong color seem to be text that is defined with a text style or paragraph style. It seems that the "Character Color" setting in Paragraph Style Options is not smart enough to link to the new color definition/name when pages are combined.

    Of course, the work-around would just be to hard-code/name the colors I want...IE just fix the layout. But we're hoping to back convert 180 issues of the magazine into HTML format. Each magazine, has a dozen or so separate layout docs just asking for trouble. This would be tedious to the point of aggravation.

    Ben

    PS I'm also running in to master page confusion. More on that later...or in another thread.

    rob day
    Community Expert
    rob dayCommunity Expert
    Community Expert
    April 7, 2017

    Right, I think you will have problems with this approach. When you copy text between documents, same named styles take on the attributes of the style in the destination doc. If you wanted to use the source styles you would have to load them before the move, but that wouldn't help in your case.

    It would be possible to script a name change for the colors—a script could append all of the swatches in a doc with the document name, so AccentColor would become AccentColor-docName. Then there would be no conflicts with either the styles or swatches.

    Willi Adelberger
    Community Expert
    Willi AdelbergerCommunity Expert
    Community Expert
    April 7, 2017

    If the swatches are changed I would recommend to rename them before. I would also suggest that all styles are moved in a folder in each document with a different name.

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