Exporting Color Swatch Info From InDesign

January 3, 2008 11:03 AM

Is there a way to export color swatch information from InDesign into text?

I have an extensive palette of swatches built in InDesign that represent the CMKY equivalents of all the colors in my employer's product line. Each color is labeled according to the corresponding product. What I would eventually like to have is a table that has our product number and the CMYK value in two columns to share with our distributors/customers who might need this reference, but don't necessarily use any program from the Adobe suite. I have no idea how I can get that information out of the swatches palette and into a text based format, short of opening each color and manually typing the CMYK value into a Word doc. Help? Thanks!

posted by slowfasthazel to computers & internet (8 comments total)

It would take a little hand work, but you could quite easily create such a chart in InDesign itself, then export it as a PDF. Treat it as a sales sheet.
I've yet to run across anyone, in this day and age, that can't view a PDF.
posted by Thorzdad at 11:34 AM on January 3, 2008

Sorry if my question is unclear. The part I need to figure out is how to get the information from the color swatch palette into text that can be formatted. Creating the table and all that afterward is no problem. I would really like to avoid typing (whether into InDesign or Word) all of those CMYK values because there are literally hundreds of colors. Is there a program that can extract the information from Colorbook files? That would be perfect.
posted by slowfasthazel at 11:57 AM on January 3, 2008

You can "save swatches for exchange" from the swatch palette, and then do a little text wrangling to format it without much keyboarding.

Open the resulting .ase file in any text editor, replace the ASEF> at the beginning and everything after the K=X value, and you're left with

C=X M=X Y=X K=X

and that sounds like what you need, yes?
posted by luriete at 12:35 PM on January 3, 2008

If you have an InDesign doc that uses each swatch somehow on the page (color blocks or whatever), you can export the entire palette as an .ase file (drop down menu item in the Swatches palette). I'm sure that somehow you could extract or import that library's/file's info/contents, but I didn't get that far.
posted by iamkimiam at 12:35 PM on January 3, 2008

what luriete said.
posted by iamkimiam at 12:36 PM on January 3, 2008

To make this a bit easier, do a find/replace on "CMYK" - which follows the black value - into a tab, and then use a wildcard to kill "tab + garbage + EOL" and replace it with just an EOL.
posted by luriete at 12:36 PM on January 3, 2008

If opening an ASE file in a text editor brings up semi-recognizable-but-useless text as it does for me (could be because mine aren't named as values), you might have better luck exporting an Indesign Interchange file and using some regular expression voodoo.

'colr' is the element, 'clvl' is the value you want to fool with.

Isn't XML supposed to be human-readable? Damn...
posted by Plug Dub In at 1:20 PM on January 3, 2008

Thanks for the help so far! I'm getting the useless text, too. Luriete's plan works if the colors are named as their values, but I want the color name and the CMYK value together. I think regular expression voodoo with an Interchange file is over my head.
posted by slowfasthazel at 1:40 PM on January 3, 2008