From the course: InDesign Secrets

261 Update swatches by syncing - InDesign Tutorial

From the course: InDesign Secrets

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261 Update swatches by syncing

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- [Instructor] A common situation for designers is that you're working on a document in InDesign, and you want to use some of the styles and colors and other attributes from a different document, from say a template or previous version or a redesigned version. How do you do that with colors? It doesn't work quite the same as it does with styles, so let's review how it works with styles, I'll show you the problem with colors and then show you a workaround. So here we have two documents, a white paper and a brochure. And they look pretty different. Here in the white paper we have some subheads, as you can see, Paragraph Styles, Subheads. And here in the brochure, we also have a subhead, and let's say just for sake of argument that I want to use this style of subhead over here in my white paper. So to do that, you choose Load Styles, I'm going to go to the Paragraph Styles panel menu, choose Load Paragraph Styles, select the name of the document that I want to pull from and I get this nice little selection dialog box that says which one do you want to bring over? I'm going to uncheck all of them except for subhead, that's the one I want to bring over, and because there is a matching one, a conflict is what they call it, a style with that name in this target document, it asks me, "What do you want to do?" And it defaults to using the incoming definition meaning the attributes for subhead in the brochure are going to be used instead of what we have here. The other choice that you could have is to rename it. Then I'll say Use Incoming Definition which is exactly what I want to do, click OK, and there we go, we have the subhead matching. Now what if you want to do that with colors? Let's close this guy, I'll put him back, and we'll open up the Swatches panel. Okay, let's say that for Swatches, do you see this drop cap R? Let's say that we want to change the color that this drop cap uses which I happen to have named Drop cap here in the Swatches panel, with a color from the brochure. And okay let's say that we want this one, alright, this orange color. Well first of all you can see one problem is that the colors or swatches are normally named by their color mix if you're not using a spot color, so the first thing that you probably know that you need to do is make sure that the names match, so I'm just going to rename this one, turn off Name With Color Value and call it Drop Cap. Okay, so that should do it, right? I'll come back over here to white paper and I'll go to Swatches, Load Swatches, now here it's different, we don't get the dialog box that's going to compare the incoming swatches with the current swatches, instead it's just going to suck up all of the swatches that are in the document that I select, and it's going to add them to my target document swatches panel. Which is kind of a pain, go ahead and click Open, and oh, here's the second problem is that one or more imported swatches will be renamed. What happened, we have Drop Cap and Drop Cap 2, it did not redefine this, it's kind of a pain, isn't it? Now what I could do in this case with this particular document, and I only have one color that I'm worrying about, I could select the color drop cap and delete it, like this, with the Trash Can and then I get the opportunity to replace it with Drop Cap 2, I'm not gonna do that now, because this is a workaround for getting InDesign to automatically update the combination used for Drop Cap with the incoming attributes, how do you do that? The only way that I know of is to use the book panel feature of Sync Swatches. Now these two documents do not belong to a book, but you can use that feature anyway, I think that this command should really be called Collection because that's really what it does, I'm gonna call it Sync Swatches, and really this is just a temporary book file, I'm not gonna need to reuse it for anything else, and I'll add the two documents here to my book. So here's the key, the one that you want to pull the definition from needs to be called the style source, and in this case the style source is pre-selected to be the brochure because it came in first in the alphabetical order, but if not, like if I wanted the white paper to be the source, I would just click right here to make that the source. So you just click to the left of a document name to make it a style source. Now the power for this feature comes in if you had many documents that you wanted to bring in the swatch definition and have it replace the existing swatch definition in other documents, if I had like 30 documents belonging to Globe Bank, and they changed the color of their logo, for example, I could add them all to this book panel, and then choose the correct color logo as used in one of these documents and have that sync and update all the other ones, here we're just going to do one document. So that's number one is to choose a style source, number two is go to the Book Panel menu, go down to Synchronize Options, and make sure and turn off everything else other than Swatches, we don't want to mess around with accidentally updating style sheets and such. So I'm just clicking to make sure nothing is going to be synced except for Swatches, I'll turn that off too. Alright, that's about it, click OK, click in the gray area so that no documents are selected meaning apply this to all, and then click the sync icon here, or choose it from the panel menu, bam, look at that. (chuckles) Drop cap got updated to match the definition for drop cap in our style source and it turned orange, there you go, now you can just go ahead and close this, you don't need to save the book, and you can delete the book file, the INDB file from your hard drive, and the two documents can go on just as before, only now you've synced your swatches.

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