On May 16, 2013, at 8:34 AM, Robert Stott wrote: I wonder if anyone can help me with an InDesign task? I'm trying to get all the separations for a document - that's to say, all the printing plates that would be required to print a job. I'm using:
tell application "Adobe InDesign CS5.5" tell front document set theInks to name of every ink end tell end tell
...but I have a bit of a problem. When I use this method I get *all* the CMYK separations whether they're needed or not. So, if I have a job which is just in black, I get three extra separations listed that aren't needed.
Am I missing something? Can anyone help?
Hi Rob,
Your goal is a worthy one, but as far as I can tell, it's not possible to do in a simple, direct way. Shane may weigh in later with some other ideas, if there are any.
My first thought was the Preflight palette (menu item Window > Output > Preflight). (Preflight functionality is accessible via AppleScript using the 'save report' command.) Unfortunately, it only reports problems and can't provide a list of used inks. Even if it did, it would likely list all the process colors, used or not.
My second thought was to script a brute-force attack to determine the inks used by every fill, stroke, gradient, gap, placed graphic, and whatever else that appears on every page. It quickly became clear that such a script would probably be impossible to pull off. The hardest part would be dealing with colors defined in non-CMYK color spaces.
So the only thing left is the Separations Preview palette (menu item Window>Output>Separation Preview). This is a valuable tool for troubleshooting overprints, rich blacks, spot colors, etc. To determine used inks with this palette, toggle visibility on for each separation and look on every page for objects of that color. It's manual (sorry) and requires some work, but is the best idea I can come up with.
Regards, Stan C.
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