Back in April 2025, I wrote an article that was first inspired by the desire to assign keyboard shortcuts to Adobe Acrobat, Fuji XMF and Enfocus pitstop actions so that they could be hot-keyed to my Elgato Streamdeck. Instead, I entered a rabbit-hole about a feature of Enfocus Pitstop that was a whole other issue.

Then in August 2025, Elgato announced an additional feature for Streamdeck  users that was to improve their users experiences even further – Virtual Streamdeck . This is the ability to add a toggle that will present additional onscreen buttons that a user can then select from, similar to features already familiar to Wacom tablet users. This is worth a future Colecandoo article of its own, but it refocused my desire to add keyboard shortcuts to my Streamdeck  that were more in line with my everyday tasks.

Perhaps one of my most routine tasks is to check color separations, whether in Adobe Acrobat, InDesign, Illustrator or Photoshop, so adding these buttons to the Streamdeck  would be a no-brainer… at least I thought.

Separations Preview – an innovation still unique to Creative Cloud

As a side note, it is worth pointing out that the live separations preview that exists in Adobe Illustrator, InDesign and Acrobat is a feature that other competitors do not have. In short, there are no live separations preview options in Quark Xpress, Corel Draw, Affinity Publisher or Affinity Designer. There are ways to view the separations through a print preview dialog, but this isn’t the same as a live preview where edits can be made while a color separation is toggled off.

To be fair, Adobe Photoshop and Affinity Photo do have the ability to view colour channels.

May be unique to Creative Cloud, but isn’t consistent

Another side note is that while InDesign, Illustrator and Acrobat do have a live separations preview, their effectiveness isn’t the same between the three. Needing the most improvement is Illustrator’s live separations preview – this lets a user see what the output separations will look like, and allow only those separations in use to appear. However, unlike InDesign or Acrobat, it lacks most of the other features, particularly the ability to hover the cursor on a particular area to yield the information about the separations where the cursor is.

InDesign’s live separation is good and does more than Illustrator’s view such as showing ink limits, desaturating black, allowing ink mapping etc, but is still not as good as Adobe Acrobat’s.

Acrobat’s live separation has to be the best of the three, allowing for a wide array of features. The comparisons between the three are shown in this table below.

Ideally it would be great if they all behaved the same way, and the best way is to ask the developers nicely via their respective uservoice pages.

Ain’t no shortcuts in Acrobat or Illustrator

As great as Acrobat’s output preview feature is, first hurdle was here while trying to determine what the keyboard shortcuts for the separations were in Acrobat so they could be hot-keyed. Unfortunately, they don’t exist. About the only keyboard shortcut that was related was to open and close the output preview window, and that was the Tilde key (~). This was the same story for Illustrator – there was a keyboard shortcut to get to the separations preview, but nothing else.

InDesign’s shortcuts are strange

InDesign does allow for the separations preview to be controlled by keyboard shortcuts (KBSC), but in an unusual way. Here are the options from the keyboard shortcut customisation:

I can see that the KBSC for show black plate is Opt + Shift + Cmd + 4, so I try this shortcut… and nothing happens. Turns out for this shortcut to work, you must have the separations preview panel open, and then it works.

However, this only turns off all other separations and leaves the Black separation visible. If I want to see all of the colors again, I have to use a different shortcut Opt + Shift + Cmd + ~

But that’s not how I’d argue that most people in my role would use the separations preview. They would usually have all separations visible, and then toggle a specific separation on and off to see the ink’s behaviour.

I then went searching for the keyboard shortcut to toggle a color separation (rather than show a color separation) in InDesign, and learned it did not exist. The only keyboard shortcuts were to:

• show an individual process color (not toggle) while turning all others off;
• show all colors (not toggle); or
• show spot colors 1-5 (not toggle) while turning all others off.

Omata Mate to the rescue?

I’ve had a philosophy for a while that if there’s a feature not in an Adobe product, then see if someone else has already made it or make your own. After searching for a while, it looked like no third party solution existed for InDesign.

But regular readers of Colecandoo will be aware of my recent use of the Omata Mate plug-in. Perhaps that can script a solution for me…

Unfortunately no. I’d typed my prompt “hide the visibility of the black color separation” and waited… and waited… was seeing a lot of “error, trying to fix” messages popping up, but then a message I’d never seen:

This was using ChatGPT5. In my experience this either works really well or terribly, so I thought I’d try the Gemini 2.5 Pro model… but encountered this error:

Can I write the fix myself?

Frustrated, I was aware that it was possible to directly call menu commands from InDesign with the following code:

app.menuActions.itemByID(XXXXX).invoke();   

where the XXXXX is a number that is assigned to a particular menu item.

Scripting legend Peter Kahrel has a script called Menu actions that will list all of these numbers. I’d run the script and filtered by the word ‘plate’, revealing the following entries:

But these actions behave exactly the same as the items that could be hotkeyed with keyboard shortcuts – that is they only show either all process separations or one at a time, not toggle a particular separation on or off… and the separations panel has to be open first.

So the inability to script my way out of the issue is not the fault of my own scripting or Omata Mate. As I wrote in my first piece about Omata Mate:

As great as this plug-in is, it is only as good as the software that it’s working within.

If the application that you are writing software for won’t let you control visibility of an item, then no amount of client-side written code will make it happen – the InDesign developers need to make this change.

No joy… off to the uservoice!

For the first time in a while, I was unable to script my way out of a situation. Hanging my head in defeat, all I could do was head to the InDesign uservoice page to make the request… and found that a similar request already exists!

So I’ve now added my name to the list and encourage others to rally to the cause.

and the Illustrator uservoice,

and the Adobe Acrobat uservoice!

One other quirk…

While preparing the research for this article, I’d realised that out of the three applications that have live separation previews, only Adobe Acrobat lets you view a page with all CMYK separations turned off.

In Adobe InDesign, one spot color must always be visible – it isn’t possible to view a page without any separations.

If you want to view all CMYK separations off, then you have to make a sacrificial spot color that isn’t used just so that it can be the one separation that is left visible, but the CMYK channels can be turned off. In the sample below, I’ve just quickly made a spot color called “filler” that isn’t actually used.

The same behaviour happens in Illustrator.

But if I make a sacrificial color, it doesn’t show up in the separations panel until I uncheck the “show unused spot colors only” checkbox in the separations preview panel.

Similarly, this issue also occurs in Adobe Photoshop’s channels. Again, making a new spot channel will allow the CMYK separations to be no longer visible.

It’s not often that I’ll want other Adobe applications to behave like Adobe Acrobat, but in this case the output preview features of Adobe Acrobat are superior to the other separations preview features in the other Creative Cloud applications.