Can´t delete Pantone swatches
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- This topic has 15 replies, 10 voices, and was last updated 6 years, 12 months ago by
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Hello.
We make documents that we pass over to another designer and everytime it comes back it´s filled with lots of unused Pantone colors. And it´s impossible to delete those swatches from the document. It won´t work turning them into CMYK-swatches either. Is there a way to get rid of those swatches of dead meat?
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Hello again and thx for fast reply again. The “Select all unused” command doesn´t work. It´s still greyed out. The you might propose that it can be an image that contains the Pantone color but even if I delete everything in the document, it still won´t be deleted. I have in my backhead that you could open up an inx-file in a texteditor and just delete it from there. But CS5 doesn´t have inx-files and idml-files can´t be opened in texteditors.
Your´re right about this designer should clean up his document but this is a “I know everything so much better than you and won´t take advices-kind”. So it´s hard to cope with.
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IDML can be opened in a text editor, but you need to expand it first (it's a zipped archive of folders and files). The swatches will then be listed in a file called 'Graphic.xml' in a folder called 'Resources'. Once you've edited it, you'll need to recompress it. There's a couple of InDesign scripts here for the process. I've never tried to delete swatches in this way, though, so I don't know whether it would work.
I take it that if you're looking into editing the IDML, you've already tried opening the IDML and seeing if you can then edit the swatch. You could also try copying the pages into another document and seeing if the colour goes with them; or adding a graphic to the file which does contain that swatch (or at least a swatch by that name), deleting the graphic again, and then seeing if you can now edit the swatch.
Have you asked the designer what the swatches are used for?
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Yeah, generally, you can just export IDML and open the IDML file and the swatches will be “fixed.”
If you still can't find the color, you might try the Edit > Find Color feature with Blatner Tools (blatnertools.com)… it can sometimes uncover where a colored object is, even when you think you've gotten rid of them all.
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I tried the scripts mentioned above to edit the IDML to remove the offending swatches but it didn't work. I tried changing the “removable” to “true” for each of the swatches and I also tried just deleting the entire reference to the color from the xml file but neither had any effect on the swatch once I reopened the IDML file. I really want this to work as making new swatches exactly named and importing them is a pain!
Anyone had any success with editing the IDML file?
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Hi Ralla, don't know if you ever got a fix for this but here it is.
1. Create a AI file with the offending Pantone swatch used in it.
2. Place AI file in InDesign
3. Delete AI file from InDesign
4. Delete “undeletable” Swatch from InDesign.
Don't know why this works but it does, has happened to me a few times now.
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Bumping and old post, but I have the same problem, and have tried pretty much every suggestion on this thread. That little bugger of a spot colour is STILL greyed out! Anyone find another fix?
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There’s an old post about this here:
https://creativepro.com/color-swatches-that-wont-delete.php/comment-page-1The INX trick needs to be updated to handle IDML (which replaced INX)…
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