In the same way that different political or religious views can polarise a group of people, so can one specific InDesign feature: Light or Dark interface.
Introduced into InDesign CC in 2013, this change brought InDesign in line with other Creative Cloud products that had a dark interface. That said, I was not a fan and chose to remain a user of the light interface.
Many years later and
Apple released the macOS Mojave with its Dynamic Desktop and Dark mode. The
Dynamic Desktop feature shows a bright desktop during daylight hours and a dark
desktop during the dark hours. In addition, popular apps also followed suit
allowing users to switch from the usual view to a “night mode”.
In addition, I have found myself working late into the night on projects, and have found that a darker interface during these hours is easier on my eyes. That said, I still like to use a light interface when working in daylight hours.
With this in mind, I wondered if it was possible to create an InDesign startup script that – upon performing a common task such as opening a file – would check the time of day and if it was beyond a certain time of the day, would invoke the dark interface… and it was.
This refers to the color of the pasteboard. The number 1 will match the pasteboard color to the interface, whereas 0 will leave the pasteboard white.
So technically it’s not a night-mode per se, but for those who like the light interface until the night-time hours, this script may be something to consider.
You finally have an approval on that print project you’ve been working on for the last few months. All that’s left to do is make a PDF for the printer and be done with it, right?
Nope. It’s time to do some housekeeping on the file. Let me use this metaphor, once you’ve made dinner, you don’t leave your dirty pots and pans in the sink, do you?
It’s time to do some housekeeping, and in this episode of “must haves” on the Colecandoo Youtube channel, we’ll look at several scripts to keep your files nice and tidy.
Disclaimer
One word of caution with any of the scripts shown in the video. They are all destructive in nature. That is, they intentionally remove items from a document. Make sure you save your work prior to running these scripts, just in case they have a catastrophic impact on your artwork. I’m showing these scripts for educational purposes only, this is not a tutorial on how to use these scripts.
The first script removes items from the pasteboard. Run the script and select the distance from the trim edge and importantly whether threaded text on the pasteboard should be removed.
I can hear some of you now saying “but what if I’ve left important notes on the pasteboard for the next person who works on the artwork”? Well, either don’t use this script, or put your notes on after you’ve run this script.
This script removes any purely empty frames, that is no fill or stroke that have no special settings applied such as text wrap or text on a path. Once run, it scans the document and removes all of these empty frames.
The next script resamples all images over a given resolution to a more appropriate resolution. It’s great for projects such as yearbooks where the resolution of images is often far greater than it needs to be.
Now, I was in two minds to whether I show this script or not. Out of the scripts being shown in this video, this is both the most powerful and potentially most destructive of them. Ultimately, read the instructions before using this script, and make sure you have access to backups in case things go wrong.
Colour
Next, let’s address some colour issues that may have come about from selecting registration by mistake, or left-over swatches from a Microsoft Word import.
Unlike many scripts I’ve shown previously, most of these scripts are buried in forum posts, so it’s a matter of reading the post, finding the script, copying and pasting into a text editor and saving as a .jsx file.
It’s worth noting that all of these scripts only affect colours generated within InDesign, so won’t fix colour issues in links such as PDFs or photoshop files.
Add unnamed colours
Let’s start off with this easy one-line script that adds all unnamed colours to the swatches palette. True, it’s just as easy to select this from the swatches menu. Regardless how it’s run, this should be the first step to cleaning up the swatches. You can cut and paste it from below:
app.menuActions.item("$ID/Add All Unnamed Colors").invoke();
This script launches a prompt that allows you to search for colours that are a given percentage different from each other and merge them to the swatch that appears higher in the swatches panel.
If you’re using a special knockout black swatch and don’t want it to become the default black, perhaps make it a spot colour while running these scripts.
I explain the differences between these colours in more depth in Episode 14.
I’ve written a script that converts RGB and LAB values that appear as shades of grey to equivalent shades of Black, while leaving other swatches alone to be dealt with by another script.
There are two scripts that can take faux black values and convert them either to 100% black or rich black. The faux black is determined by CMYK values beyond certain percentages. In this case, any swatch that is over 70 Cyan, 60 Magenta, 60 Yellow and 90 Black will be converted to either 100% black or rich black. You can dig into the script if you like, and redefine what constitutes a rich black or faux black.
Next is this script that removes any layers that contain no artwork.
Remove unused styles and groups
This is a series of scripts that removes any styles not used in the artwork, as well as unnecessary style groups that may have been left, whether deep in folders or not. In the video it is combined into one “catch-all” script for convenience, but it is the work of many authors, so it’s not right for me to host it. Links to the originals can be found here, here, here, here and here.
Lastly, this script removes all guidelines in a document. I can see that there would be some use for guidelines to remain in a document, but felt it was worth demonstrating.
Preflight
To be sure that the artwork is completely free of issues, we want to make sure that there are no prepress issues. To make sure that the artist complied with the preflight that was associated with the document, there’s the preflight enforcer.
As shown on the Colecandoo Youtube channel before, I’ve prepared two scripts that will either warn or prevent a user from printing or exporting to PDF until all preflight issues are resolved.
So there you have it, over ten scripts that will help make housekeeping of InDesign files a lot easier. If there’s any that I’ve missed or you feel would be worthy of a future video, let me know via my contact page.
In recent times, I have received several pieces of “finished art” supplied by clients where the sales representative has informed me that the printed material must be “on-brand” according to the client’s style guides. That should be the end of the story, but upon checking the finished art, it is clear that the artwork has not met the client’s own style guides, or been thoroughly checked by the client prior to submission.
One of two things will now happen – the prepress department can either fix the artwork without disturbing the client in order to fulfil the brief and expedite the work, or we can contact the client informing them of the situation and THEN ask whether we can fix it or have resupplied artwork that is color correct. Considering that the client may receive their proof and resupply the artwork in its entirety, this means fixing the colors again.
For years, I’ve been an advocate of receiving finished artwork that is correct for the following reasons:
The client has correct content;
Eliminates the risk of human error in prepress from incorrect or unintentional manipulations during corrections;
Prepress can output more work considering they are not spending time manipulating files that may only be replaced at a moment’s notice;
My employer isn’t losing revenue on prepress time that usually is not passed onto clients by the sales representatives.
That said, I make sure to contact customers who have supplied finished art that is incorrect and outline the issue, giving them the opportunity to resolve the issue themselves or let us do it. It is at this stage where some customers have been willing to fix the artwork themselves, but cannot see the issue. When I ask them to check the separations preview panel, the answer is always the same – “where’s that?”. Because this is a panel that I use so often as a prepress operator, I often think to myself “are you kidding me?” but to be fair, there are many panels in InDesign that I don’t use such as the animations panel; and I would have no idea how to use either.
On that note, I have prepared a video on my Youtube channel on how to use the Separations Preview within Adobe InDesign and used it to highlight instances of color mismatches, issues with black ink, and when white overprints.
This is not the first time I’ve been on my soapbox about this before – (see this article). It also directly relates to:
Paying attention to this advice and applying it to artwork should result in a good printed reproduction, correct? While the answer should be yes, there is one more level of control of black appearance and overprints, and that is in the hands of the printing company and their output software.
OFFSET EXAMPLE
Let us look at this following example:
This card is set up for a Black plus spot output for an offset press. The Black is only overprinting on the text as misregistration would be noticeable here, but the Black elsewhere is knocking out so that the colour does not look muted through the yellow.
However, despite best intentions and checking the separations both in InDesign and Acrobat, the card has printed like this (effect is exaggerated for the screen):
So what has happened? The separations were correct, they were checked in both InDesign and Acrobat! It turns out that the Raster Image Processor (RIP) software that the commercial printer uses to image the design onto the printing plates has its own settings. Here are some example screenshots from AGFA’s Apogee X system and Fuji’s XMF system respectively about the overprinting of black:
In both screenshots above, the respective RIP software CAN honor the settings that were in the initial PDF and not apply its own preferences, but in the instance of the business card, the RIP settings overrode the PDF settings and chose to overprint all instances of 100% black, regardless what swatches were chosen in InDesign.
DIGITAL PRINT EXAMPLE
Using the same artwork, the card was printed via a colour copier, but this time the result was as follows:
So what happened here? The while the solid black looks good, where the black in the top line meets the vignette looks rather weak, and there are is a lighter black around the travel agent. What is going on?
Again, the RIP software has manipulated the artwork with unintentional results. Unlike printing directly to a desktop printer, most digital printers will print to a RIP where the file can be imposed, colour adjusted and printed in whatever order the prepress operator sees fit.
Using the EFI Fiery RIP, there is a little-known feature of the RIP that changes the way black is displayed that can produce unexpected results, and that is in the color settings dialog box and it is “Pure Black On”.
This setting takes every instance of 100K and ramps the colour to a “super black” as opposed to using the black toner only. Again, this setting can be changed, but when this card was printed, the defaults were unchanged resulting in this unwanted appearance.
This setting only applies to vectors and text AFTER the PDF is flattened into postscript. This is visible where the rich black abruptly changes to the muted black. One look at the flattener preview in InDesign confirms that areas of flat black in that image were as a result of the flattening.
THE RESULT?
This small example shows how changing the client’s intended black overprints can have unwanted consequences. For prepress operators it is a wake-up call to make sure that the RIP defaults will maintain the clients’ expected results; and for designers or publishers it is worth understanding that even the treatment of black overprint is an important topic.
