Make a color hidden.

[studio172]

Hello!

Does anyone know if it's possible to make a color with scripting that doesn't show up in the swatches panel of indesign?

greetings,

Stefan

[Loic.Aigon]

I ma not sure about that lthough I was told (and checked) that there was (is it still there ?) a bug that when you did something in the swatch panel (maybe add a swatch or something like that), then extra colors were added without showing up. I mean you could have 10 swatches visually in the panel but 12 colors in the collection of colors.

But anyway, I doubt you could reproduce this per scripting (unless I am wrong) but if you intend to use a color only for a temporary purpose, the, you could create it, use it, save/export or whatever operation, then remove the color.

FWIW

Loic

[studio172]

Yes true, there are hidden colors in the indesign model (indeed more colors in the color-collection than in the swatch-panel)...

The thing is: I was adding a gradient to indesign. To make the colorstops i have to make colors first and then assign them to the colorstops. And now the colorstops show up in the swatches panel (which i don't want... i only want the gradient to show up).

But if i remove the colors after having completed the gradient, the gradient goes wrong (all colorstops go to black...)

[Laubender · Accepted solution]

Hi Stefan,

see this post and the following:

Re: Coloring a Font with a RGB etc. without adding the color to the document swatches.

Regards,
Uwe

[Laubender]

You could use insertLabel(), extractLabel() for the added unnamed colors to get control by labeling the unnamed colors with a string that could be the substitute for a name value.

Regards,
Uwe

[Laubender]

No. That's not strange at all. Not with InDesign ExtendScript.

Colors is a collection (something like an array) and index number -1 denotes the last element of that collection.

Are there alternatives to get what you want?

Another way—more cleaner if you want to use a named, but also invisible color—would be to edit an IDML file or even better to edit an exported IDMS snippet (that's easier) with an object that has a fillColor applied.

In IDML / IDMS there is the property "Visible" for Color that can be set from "true" to "false". Unfortunately that is not in InDesign's DOM for ExtendScript.

With IDML / IDMS if you leave out property "AlternateColor" empty, set "Name" not to an empty string and use "false" as value for "Visible" you could create a snippet, that will import the invisble, named color, if the named color is not already in the document.

Regards,
Uwe

[studio172]

Great Uwe!!!

Thanks a lot! I've been banging my head on this problem for days!

This does the trick:

var myUnnamedColor = app.activeDocument.colors[-1].duplicate();

(kind of strange though... an index of -1?)

[Laubender]

studio172 wrote:

… This does the trick:

var myUnnamedColor = app.activeDocument.colors[-1].duplicate();

(kind of strange though... an index of -1?)

Hi Stefan,

before you get too excited, that would only work if not all unnamed colors were removed.
There is a slim chance for that, if e.g. a scripter has played around too much 😉

For a more secure method to add an unnamed color with a dedicated color model—RGB, CMYK or LAB—see my post # 30 in the same thread here where I first add an unnamed color by using different menu commands of the Color panel (not the Swatches panel!):

Re: Coloring a Font with a RGB etc. without adding the color to the document swatches.

Regards,
Uwe

[studio172]

Thanks Uwe! I'll keep that in mind!