Auto-importing colors

[MartinRTR]

Hi

Just before we all switch from Quark (RIP) to indesign Quark introduced a wonderful feature. If you placed an illustrator file into a quark document it added all the colours in that document to the quark colour palette AUTOMATICALLY. Man this saved hours of time toggling between the two programmes, writing down CMYK values and manually creating the colours in Quark.

Now you would have thought that as Indesign and Illustrator are both adobe products this feature would be right in there. It might be, but no amount of searching reveals it! I have read a couple of posts about saving the colour palette as an ase file in illustrator and importing - ok, I guess this would work but a bit of a faff. Also I tried clicking the 'new swatch' option in indesign, selecting 'other' in the colour mode  and navigating to my illustrator document but when I select my .eps (I also tried an .ai) I get an error message 'select a file compatible with Illustrator 8 or above'. As it happens my file is compatible with 17 and above - I checked.

So, gentle forum helpers, am I missing something right under my nose? Can you bring illustrator colours into an indesign file just by pressing cmd+d (on a mac) and place the file. Or is the ase file route the only way?

Thanks in advance

Martin

[rob day · Accepted solution]

If you specify the Color Type of the Illustrator colors you want to import as Spot they will be added to the ID Swatches when you place. You can then simply select all of the ID spot swatches and convert them to Process via Swatch Options, or use Ink Manager to set All Spots to Process.

[Luke_Jennings]

In InDesign, go to Preferences> Clipboard Handling> All information (on), In Illustrator, select and copy an element (or elements) that uses a desired swatch color, paste the element into InDesign, the swatch value will appear in the InDesign swatches. Delete the pasted element and the swatch will remain.

[rob day]

On Luke's paste (not place) option–you also have to have Prefer PDF When pasting unchecked before you do the cut and paste. And, if it matters, process colors get named with their values and not the AI swatch name.

[MartinRTR]

Thanks you guys – that's really helpful

Power to you

Martin