Hello!! Looking for a bit of help with this issue with replacing multiple linked/unembedded files in Illustrator.
Background info:
My team does a lot of design work for paper goods that require glitter or foil to be applied during the production process. Most of these items rely on the use of patterns within Illustrator to create seamless pieces from which items can be made by factories. When creating a "preview" of an item, we use JPEG/PNG files of the glitter/foil to be used so the client can imagine the end result. For the "production" part of the file, we use a solid fill to represent the glitter/foil so the factory knows where the embellishment should be put. In some cases, we also have to create a duplicate artboard of just the embellishment instances and need to "white-out" all other artwork. Keeping intricate patterns live within the file also takes up loads of space and slows down the viewing and editing process.
The problem:
We are looking for a way to quickly replace these embellishment instances with a solid fill color
Methods that haven't worked or aren't efficient:
1. duplicating the pattern swatch for the production component (so as not to affect the pattern used on the overview), then within the duplicate pattern swatch, individually releasing clipping masks, deleting the linked file, changing the clipping mask color to a solid fill, repeating for each instance
2. expanding the pattern swatch, going into each clipping mask of the expanded swatch, using the magic wand tool to select all clipping masks, copying clipping masks, pasting in place and changing fill to solid fill color, deleting all links within the expanded swatch (this doesn't allow for multiple embellishments, each of which would need its own solid fill color)
3. expanding the pattern swatch, unembedding all images within the expanded group, re-linking each unembedded image with an image of just the solid fill color (can take thousands of clicks, depending on the size of the pattern tile and of the path using it)
You can find a screen recording of the second method in use and an example file here: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1a64EQUflaYF5Sn8D99sl6fnynbY_LpUK?usp=sharing . The embellishment used in this example is meant to resemble a gold foil.
Any ideas for ways to fix this are appreciated! Thank you!!
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