Deleting and Copying Swatches

When you create colors, tints , and gradients (described later in this chapter), you'll find it easy to go overboard and make too many. You'll also find that different documents have different colors, each created by different people, and you'll likely want to move colors from one document to another. InDesign provides basic tools for managing colors in and across documents.

Note ‚  

Remember that when selecting swatches for deletion or duplication, you can z +click or Ctrl+click multiple swatches to work on all at once. Note that Shift+clicking selects all swatches between the first swatch clicked and the swatch that you Shift+click, whereas z +click or Ctrl+click lets you select specific swatches in any order and in any location in the pane.

Deleting swatches

InDesign makes deleting swatches easy: Just select the color , tint, or gradient in the Swatches pane. Then choose Delete Swatch from the palette menu, or click the Trash Can icon on the Mac or the X icon in Windows (the Delete Swatch box) at the bottom of the Swatches pane.

Well, that's not quite it. You'll then get the dialog box shown in Figure 8-6, which lets you assign anything using the deleted swatch to a new color (the Defined Swatch option) or leave the color on any object that happens to be using it, but delete the swatch from the Swatches pane (the Unnamed Swatch option). (As explained in the sidebar "The evils of the Color pane's colors," unnamed colors should be avoided, so if your document is using a color, keep its swatch.)

Figure 8-6: The Delete Swatch dialog box lets you replace a deleted color with a new one, or leave the color applied to objects using it.

Caution ‚  

If you delete a tint and have it replaced with another color, any object using that tint will get the full-strength version of the new color, not a tint of it.

Likewise, if you delete a color swatch that you've based one or more tints on, those tints will also be deleted if you replace the deleted swatch with an unnamed swatch. However, if you delete a color swatch and replace it with a defined swatch, any tints of that deleted swatch will retain their tint percentages of the replacement defined swatch.

Tip ‚  

InDesign offers a nice option to quickly find all unused colors in the Swatches pane: the palette menu's Select All Unused option. Then you can just delete them in one fell swoop. Note that you don't get the option to assign each deleted color separately to another color in the Delete Swatch dialog box ‚ they all are replaced with the color you select or are made into unnamed colors. Because no object uses these colors, choosing Unnamed Swatch in essence is the same as replacing them with a color using the Defined Swatch option.

If you delete a swatch and replace it with an unnamed swatch, you can recapture that deleted swatch later by choosing the Add Unnamed Colors menu item in the Swatches pane's palette menu.

Copying swatches

To duplicate a swatch, so you can create a new one based on it, use the Duplicate Swatch option in the Swatches pane. The word copy will be added to its name, and you edit it ‚ including its name ‚ as you would any swatch.

You can also import colors from other InDesign, Illustrator, and Illustrator EPS files by choosing Load Swatches from the Swatches pane's palette menu.

Tip ‚  

A quick way to import specific colors from another InDesign document or template is to drag the colors from that other file's Swatches pane into your current document or template.