Expert: Amy - 10/6/2009

Question
Hi Amy,
Sometimes when I go to print separations from AI, there's an active "color" in the print dialog separation lineup that should not be there. The tricks I use to try to discover where the mysterious & invisible element that's wanting to print a sep are: deleting stray points, printing the sep (which gives me a blank page), "dividing & conquering" where I keep deleting live image until the mysterious color no longer shows up in the seps lineup so I know the proximity of its location, & selecting a box I fill & stroke with the offending color and then try to flush it out with "Select same...", but  nothing else selects with it! Very tedious, time-consuming & frustrating! Is there some simple way to make Illustrator just tell me where the elements are for any given sep color that's active in the sep print box?
Marianne


Answer
Additional Info:
You know, you can use InDesign to generate your final PDF, too. I just did an experiment and InDesign deleted/ignored one of those "mystery" spot colors (a colored blank space in some text) whereas Illustrator generated a plate for it. I have started using InDesign more and more to generate my finals. It's great for that.

-A

Hi Marianne.

No easy way. It is tedious. Just Friday I was caught with a deadline and a stupid hidden color. I ended up calling the printer's prepress person and telling her the situation and she just discarded that plate for me. She's great.

I do everything you do and I use the Document info window to select areas of the document and narrow it down by looking at the Objects list. The Spot Colors used list in the Document Info window can also help you... but you still have to click around and select areas in your doc.

Do you have InDesign? You can pop it into InDesign and see if anything shows up in the Separation Preview Mode.

Again, blank spaces can trigger a color to remain active. They will result in a plate, too. They won't show up in InDesign, though (I don't think).

For me, nine times out of ten, it's a space (a space between words, not a blank line) in a block of text and therefore doesn't get caught with "select same."

I have found that if you select all your text and turn it to outlines, the mystery color will disappear. That step will at least tell you it's in your text blocks and is another way to narrow it down.

I hope this helps!
-Amy