How to select same rectangle in 300 grouped objects?

[Petr Holusa]

Hi there,

I am having crazy process for printing and cutting. 

Designer creates in INDD 300 unique sticky lables with ordered numbers with extra cutting edge for cutting machine and exported to pdf. 

I import the pdf into Ai all 300 artboards (so this is testing cpu performance that even my 16 core ryzen 5950x has issue with), to rearange all of those 300 labels for printing as we have paper sheet 980 mm long and after that it goes to cutting machine using those extra edges. So after importing my Ai looks like this:

For printintg I have to prepare it like this. Basically, design is in one layer and cutting is second layer. Print guy switch of the cutting edge, send to printer and with cutting app for Ai that design is off and cutter uses only pink edges. 

I don't know any better way. I talked with many printing studios, they said they they have to do this slavery task every time as described. 

1. I am wondering if there is effective way to do that because this is almost daily coffee?

2. Once INDD pdf file is exported it creates a lot of mess like clipping masks and groups that I have to clean them first to get the pink cutting edge, put them into separated layer to turn it off before printing. 

I know I can select object specific on color stroke but can't select it if it's in clipping mask or groups. Is there also some tool that can select all object inside of million undergroups, clipping masks,whatever else to get the ping edge in a few clicks? 

Many thanks. 

[Monika Gause]

So you need to rearrange the artboards?

And then also what?

[Petr Holusa]

Did you read what I wrote? 

[Monika Gause]

Did you read what I wrote? 

By @Petr Holusa

Oh, well. How nice of you.

[Bobby Henderson]

PDFs are not really meant for further editing. If I was in your position I would be asking the client to just send the original INDD file and maybe the fonts used if I didn't have the same ones already. That way I could re-arrange the layout within Adobe InDesign. That would do away with all the clipping masks and other PDF-generated garbage. Even a plugin like Astute Graphics' Vector First Aid can do only so much to elminate trash from imported PDF files.

Are you having to edit the PDF file to properly define the cut paths? I'm assuming the client does not know how to do so. If they were able to set up the cut paths properly then it might be possible for the cutting software to divide the artwork up into separate panels so they can be nested on the material better.

[Petr Holusa]

There we go, finally some interesting answer. 

Well this is just DTP task before printing and client is sending many design variations that they prepare in house and they send data to us. 

Interesting. Could you elaborate more for define the cut paths please? Because guy say he put in INDD cuttin path as a second layer but the layer is lost after importing. 

[Bobby Henderson]

The lost layer is why you need the original InDesign .INDD file rather than a PDF, especially in a situation like this where there is a lot of text and other elements involved. If they put a cut path on a second layer that layer would still be present in the original INDD file. You would be able to see the attributes of the cut path, not only its color, but also if the cut path as named correctly. For the large format vinyl printing/cutting operations I occasionally do I have to create a custom spot color and apply that to my cut paths in order for our RIP software to "see" those cut paths. The application you're using might use a different approach. Custom spot colors and spot color names would be retained in a PDF, but layers probably would not. InDesign can create PDF files in a variety of ways, but most of those are intended for print-only use or document read-only viewing, not to make further edits.