Printing color image swatch fills in greyscale?

[tqrtuomo]

My document has swatch fills that were made by Placing color pngs in Illustrator and then converting them to swatches.

I'd like to save a pdf of the document in greyscale. The Edit > Edit Colors > Convert to Greyscale command works great, but only for colors; it doesn't affect these colored swatches at all.

Any ideas? Thanks.

[Ton Frederiks]

Try to embed the png files.

[tqrtuomo]

Well, if I drag an already-created swatch into the drawing area, that will go to greyscale just fine, but other shapes that happen to be filled with that swatch aren't affected. When I create the swatches in the first place, I do embed them.

I think the answer has to be to export the document as a png, then open it up in an image editing program and turn it to greyscale there. Then I can import the greyscale image into a new Illustrator document and save as PDF from there.

[Ton Frederiks · Accepted solution]

I see, you are talking about patterns made from images.

You can double click the pattern swatch in the Swatches panel.

Select All

Edit > Edit Colors > Convert to Greyscale

Click Done to save the pattern swatch

[tqrtuomo]

Thank you, Ton!

[Ton Frederiks]

Good to hear that helped.

[Ton Frederiks]

Acrobat has way to convert your PDF to greyscale.

Open the file in Acrobat and from the Print Production tools choose Convert Colors.

Choose one of the dot gain or gray gamma conversion profiles.