Find colors and replace in tables doesn't work

Report · Nov 30, 2023

I'm using InDesign to create a document consisting of mostly tables for a calendar. When finished I create two versions, one spot colour document, and another fully black document. To do this I use Find/Change -> Color to find my spot colour and replace it with black. It mostly works, but it fails to find lots of strokes. I'm using Table Styles, Cell Styles, Paragraph Styles for almost eveything. Why is it that Find can't find colours that I can clearly see on strokes?

Not sure if it's related, but it always seems to be on spanned cells or custom stroked cells. Any clues? I've attached a sanitised version of my tables (private info removed).

Report · Nov 30, 2023

I can think of a few ways to do what you want - Styles are my favourite way - setup styles and you can change the Style itself and it changes everywhere. Very powerful setup.

Ideas

Remove spot colour:

You could delete the Spot colour swatch and replace it with Black.
Save as a new file - then have a spot colour versoin and a black version - there would be no way back if you delete the swatch - so it's important to keep two documents

If that spot colour is used in a placed image you won't be able to delete it though.

Styles:

For what you're doing you're better off creating Styles, utilising Object Styles, Paragraph Styles, Character Styles, Table Styles and Cell Styles

You just update the Style and it updates everywhere it's applied to.

Ink Manager

Alternatively - if you don't want to delete the Spot colour - and retain it for the future

You can use the Ink Manager (found in the Swatches panel) and you can MAP the spot colour to black

This would MAP all the spot colour to black ink - including in placed files, graphics, logos, files et.c where that spot colour is used are MAPPED to black colour.

However, caveats everywhere, if you do this your spot colour might be set to knockout, and for black you might to overprint the black instead of knockout.

For your sample - I don't think it's an issue

Then you can toggle between your spot colour view and the black view.