Dec 07 2011
InDesign May Not Update Homemade Illustrator Spot Colors
This was brought to my attention by a friend at EBSCO Media.
The scenario: You’ve created a dieline in Adobe Illustrator, which uses the manually created global spot color “Dieline.” It’s set to, say, a fluorescent green for easy identification.
Place the AI file in InDesign; the dieline spot color is added to the Swatches panel. So far, so good.
Select the dieline art and choose Edit Original.
In Illustrator, change the spec for the dieline spot color to, say, red, and save the file.
Return to InDesign. Although the Links panel shows that the link is updated, the swatch appearance and the artwork appearance have not changed.
The only way to fix this is to delete the artwork, then delete the swatch and and re-import the artwork.
NOTE: Sometimes it DOES work as it should (i.e., updating the link DOES change the appearance of the artwork and swatch.) But most of the time, it doesn’t.
And…If you use a genuine PANTONE spot color from one of the sanctioned color books, it behaves as it should: change to another PANTONE color in Illustrator, and InDesign will update the swatch and the placed artwork.
Since you’d probably be using the homegrown-spot approach only when you’re creating components such as dielines and varnish plates, the actual color really isn’t important: It’s only important that a plate is generated. But it’s still odd that either InDesign ignores the change, or Illustrator doesn’t successfully communicate it. Guess it’s Just One of Those Things.
[...] McCue wrote up an interesting and odd problem having to do with spot colors imported from Illustrator (for things like die [...]
What happens if you use the Ink Manager to assign an Alias – so you could create a Red Die Line spot colour – then can you map the Green Dieline to the Red colour that way?
Eugene,
Your Ink Manager approach does work, but you may have to turn on Overprint Preview to see the correct color.
And there’s a variation on what I described in the post: the appearance of the updated art may change, but the appearance of the swatch color doesn’t change.
Again, as long as it’s a distinct spot color, it will generate a separate plate, but it’s odd that Illustrator and InDesign don’t communicate better. There’s a kink in the pipeline somewhere…
It is a very odd issue. Thanks for the post. Something else to watch out for
What about renaming the spot colour when editing the Illustrator-artwork? Then you get a new swatch in InDesign and all you have to do is to replace the old swatch with the new one. At least you won’t have to worry about the excact placement of the artwork.
Andreas,
Good one! That does work. In fact, it seems to update the color of the linked artwork in InDesign. It’s a bit of an annoyance to have the new name if the swatch has been used for other page elements, but it might be the easiest workaround I’ve seen yet.
Thank you!
–Claudia