Participant

Question

Total ink coverage plug-in for InDesign

Forum|Forum|2 years ago
March 28, 2023
5 replies
5501 views

Hi! New upcoming EU legislations require that all packaging materials made of plastic only has an overall print coverage of a maximum of 60%. Does anyone know if there is a useful plugin for InDesign (or Acrobat) that can measure the overall color/print coverage of a packaging design? Also if it within that potential solution would be possible to exclude colors when measuring, e.g. to exclude transparent (greyed out areas) or white (paper/plastic)? Thanks.

Feature request

This topic has been closed for replies.

A

Agnieszka34999907u1iq

Participant

hi, can you tell me more about this upcoming legislations? Is it be only about plastic packaging materials?

P

Pickory

Legend

If a snap shot of the page was created as a png it might be possible to count the dots.

Edited.... Hmm, I like this idea. I going to write it. Not sure if it really fits the OP question.

Robert at ID-Tasker

Legend

From a quick Google search - there are tools to count pixels in the image 😉

But maybe Photoshop's Histogram can be used as a counter??

P

Pickory

Legend

Counting the pixels.

E

Eugene Tyson

Community Expert

I believe this is similar to your issue
https://community.adobe.com/t5/acrobat-discussions/can-acrobat-tell-me-the-ink-coverage-of-a-pdf/td-p/10393842

Robert at ID-Tasker

Legend

I think it's still just how many cans of ink you will use - rather than area?

Robert at ID-Tasker

Legend

Should be doable... either directly in the InDesign or by using Photoshop to rasterize PDFs and checking black areas...

J

Jonas27502917btdrAuthor

Participant

Hi Robert. Thanks for your reply. How would you do this directly in InDesign? Please also read my reply to Eugene above. Would your recommendation still be to rasterizing the PDFs and checking black areas?

Robert at ID-Tasker

Legend

I got your problem from the start 😉

If the objects would be a "simple" elements - like fully filled geometric objects - easy.

If we go for cutouts - then we somehow need to calculate what is really covered with ink - in this case the easiest way would be to rasterize PDFs in the Photoshop and "count pixels" 😉

Of course if you can make some assumptions - text on a white background is 10% of the area - then we could do it directly in the InDesign.

E

Eugene Tyson

Community Expert

InDesign has an Ink Limit view

Go to Window>Output>Separations Preview

Change the view to Ink Limit and insert your percentage.

I'm not aware of any plugin, sorry

https://creativepro.com/force-color-images-cmyk-240-ink-limit/

Robert at ID-Tasker

Legend

Don't think ink limit have anything to do with coverage area??

E

Eugene Tyson

Community Expert

Good point.

Could be a difference between TIC and TAC... need to the OP to clarify.

Total ink coverage is the total amount of ink or toner that is applied to a page. This is usually expressed as a percentage of the page area that is covered by ink or toner. For example, a page with black text and a few small images might have a total ink coverage of 10%.

Total area coverage, on the other hand, refers to the percentage of the page area that is covered by any color, including white space. For example, a page with a black and white photo that covers half the page might have a total area coverage of 50%, even if the black ink coverage is only 30%.

Good article here

https://www.prepressure.com/design/basics/tic

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