Help with script to move everything with a Specified Pantone Color to a new layer?

[Awitmer]

Hello all!

I am wanting help with writing a script that finds all objects (text or

graphics such as lines, rectangles and ovals) with either a stroke or fill

color (or both) of a certain pantone color and moves them all to a layer of

my choosing.

Can somebody point me in the right direction and help get me started?

Thanks so much in advance!

[Laubender]

Hi Awitmer ,

how should that work if one character out of several characters will be filled with a distinct Pantone color?

Should the whole text frame go to a different layer? Only one character? So you need a new text frame with that character only to hold that character?

What should happen if an object obscures another object where a Pantone color is applied as fill?

Should the object go to a different layer? Should it be exposed fully? Now that the other object cannot obscure it anymore?

What should happen if one object has a blending effect applied to where a Pantone color is applied? ( I could go on and on here. )

FWIW: I don't think that your plan will ever work using layers in InDesign.

Regards,
Uwe

[Awitmer]

Hi Uwe,

Thanks for your response. All of the text that has the pantone color are in their own text frames, so it would be ok for the whole frame to be moved to a new layer. I understand the complications that could arise from having overlapping objects, but I don’t have any of that in my document.

The whole point of me doing this was to get all of the Pantone stuff onto a separate layer so I can set it to nonprinting and export a pdf that doesn’t contain that spot color. Does that make sense? We could print to separations in a postscript file, but we are having problems with that workflow as well. What is the best way nowadays to export a doc containing spot color to file that doesn’t contain that spot color?

Help with script to move everything with a Specified Pantone Color to a new layer?

created by Laubender <https://forums.adobe.com/people/Laubender> in InDesign Scripting - View the full discussion <https://forums.adobe.com/message/11108720#11108720>

[Laubender]

Hi Awitmer ,

would it help if you remove the Pantone color and either substitute it with [Paper] or [None] ?

Regards,
Uwe

[Awitmer]

I had not thought of that, but unfortunately I am not able to delete or substitute the pantone color because it is being used in some placed graphics in the document.

[Laubender · Accepted solution]

No problem with that, I think.

You could add a new spot color to substitute the Pantone spot color by using the Ink Manager.

The trick is to define the added spot with CMYK 0,0,0,0.

Here some screenshots that illustrate this workflow.

Placed AI graphic with PANTONE spot color.
Added a spot color to the InDesign document with CMYK values all set to zero:

Ink Manager will map the PANTONE Warm Red C spot to spot color named "Substitution Color":

Overprint Preview will show the result of this trick:

Next step will be to export to PDF/X.

Below the view on the page in Acrobat Pro DC with Print Production > Output Preview

As you can see we have CMYK color plus one spot color.

Now we convert the spot to CMYK using Print Production > Convert Colors

Here the result: The spot color vanished, all objects that originally had spot color PANTONE Warm Red C applied are now in CMYK 0,0,0,0.

Easier than writing a complicated script, I think.

Regards,
Uwe

Note: The screenshots made from Acrobat Pro are showing a different version of the document where I did not rotated the placed AI graphic in its container frame. Sorry, if that was confusing to you.

[Awitmer]

Thanks a lot! I tried this and it works great! I never realized that a workflow like this could do the trick. Thanks so much for the clear directions!

[Awitmer]

Unfortunately this doesn’t seem to work with documents that have a mixed ink swatch containing a mixture of black and another color. When the pdf gets converted to CMYK in Acrobat the “substitute” spot color gets changed to a CMYK mixture. Any suggestions on how to remedy this?

Help with script to move everything with a Specified Pantone Color to a new layer?

created by Laubender <https://forums.adobe.com/people/Laubender> in InDesign Scripting - View the full discussion <https://forums.adobe.com/message/11108920#11108920>