Looking for actions or automation to remove fill from an element inside a multi page document
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I am part of a prepress team and recently we got a project from the client that came with a small grey PMS circle at the bottom of the pages to act as a guide for drill holes as part of its binary process. We had to go page by page selecting the circle and then removing the fill from it for all 70 pages. Is there an action or automated process that can do that faster in the future?
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If no other objects use the spot colour in question… Then using a custom preflight fix that references a custom preflight check:
This is making the fill object white, not none… So it may not be suitable if over a non-white background (unless overprint or multiply blends were added as a workaround).
I am more comfortable with Enfocus PitStop Pro, so there may be a better way than this quick hack.
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That was one solution we tried, ignoring the spot color in question. The problem is just how you described it though in that it makes the area white and not simply transparent. We do use PitStop but haven't come up with anything that seems to fix the problem.
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PitStop is fantastic as it offers many ways to select and change objects. Can you provide a sample PDF? It often depends on document specifics rather than a generic fix.
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I'm not sure how to post a sample here on this forum.
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Usually a file sharing site such as DropBox, WeTransfer or similar is used. You can send me the link via a private message if you don’t wish to make it public.
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This is actually pretty simple in PitStop.
Two approaches come to mind immediately: Delete the grey PMS color separation, that's pretty simple.
Or if that PMS color is used else where in the file for other content, you need an Action that will select a line art shape with a fill of the required PMS color, and you need to define the area of the drill hole(s) to isolate the element from other page content.
Then you just delete the selection.
If you have left and right hand pages with different areas, then you can do this as well.

