Expert: Kevin Stohlmeyer - 6/2/2009

Question
QUESTION: I am working in Illustrator CS3. When I copy a vector item from one open document and paste the item into another open doc ALL of the color swatches plus some swatches that aren't in the doc of the original copy over also.
I just copied an item containing two spot colors from a document that has 112 color swatches.
i pasted this item into a doc with 12 color swatches.
The result was a doc with 1,114 (yes, one thousand!) color swatches.
Some of the swatches have the curious the word "deleted' as the first word in the swatch name.
I have used Adobe products since Illustrator 88. I love Illustrator. I've never seen this before. Please help.

ANSWER: Hi Powell,

To stem the issue here is how you can work this:

In the document, go to the color palette pull down menu and choose "Select All Unused"- this (as it name implies) will select all colors not currently used in the doc. Then hit the trash icon and delete all the extra colors. Then Select All on your document and go to the pull down menu and select "Add selected colors" this will add in the used colors. The end result is a cleaned up palette.

Now, as for the extra colors, somewhere hidden in the copied item is actually 1,102 swatches coming over. Hopefully cleaning up the palette first will remove the extras. If you select all unused and the 1,102 extra swatches stay active, then you can try switching to outline mode (view-outline) and see if there is any hidden items. Normally it is something silly like a 0pt stroke of the color or a 0% fill of another, etc.

Hope this helps.

Kevin

---------- FOLLOW-UP ----------

QUESTION: Well, I cleaned up the palette of two Illustrator CS3 documents. Each doc now only had about 12 swatches in it's color palette. There weren't any stray points, strokes, etc. in each doc.
I copied an item from one of these docs then pasted in the other. The doc with the newly pasted item now has over one thousand color swatches!
How can this be?
Hope you can help.

ANSWER: Hi Powell,

Im not sure how this is possible. If you do not have these swatches assigned and they are not part of your current swatches palette then they cant just magically show up. Lets try to narrow down the issue...

Try creating a new document, draw a simple shape (rectangle) with the default colors of black stroke and white fill. Now copy this shape and paste it into your other document (after you have removed the 1000 color swatches). If it comes in clean, then the issue is with the original document. If it comes in with a bazillion colors, then you have found a new error I have never heard of, but Im hopeful this wont happen.

Now lets move onto your documents. Try copying only one item at a time from doc 1 into doc 2. Keep copying one piece at a time until the error occurs. When it happens, undo and move on to another piece and work around the error. Somewhere these colors are embedded in the artwork of this document and we need to find out where.

The other test you can try is to import doc. 1 into InDesign and see how many colors come in with it. If you get the 1,000+ colors, then somewhere in this document hidden on a layer or someplace are these 1000 pcs.

Let me know what you find out.

Thanks

Kevin



---------- FOLLOW-UP ----------

QUESTION: I cleaned up the palettes in my two docs. When I copy & paste any single item (vector or pixel item) from one doc to the other I first get a warning stating "The color swatch "deleted Global color 1487" has a conflict with the current document."
i choose Merge swatches & Apply to all & hit OK.
This warning comes up again! But with a different color swatch #
I merge swatches, apply to all & hit OK.
Then the item pastes into the doc along with over 1,000 unused color swatches.

Do I have a corrupted version of Illustrator? Can I toss out Preferences (I miss those days)?
Oh, & thank you for your prompt response.

Answer
Hi Powell,

Im not sure what is going on. Did you try two completely new documents?

You can reset your prefs by holding down shift+ctrl+opt+cmd (mac) or shift+alt+ctrl when you start up the app. It will ask you to purge the preferences, (click yes). And then retry this with two completely new documents with new components. Do not use anything from the old files. Hopefully this works otherwise you may have to reinstall is my only other suggestion.

I will pass this along the food chain to Adobe and see if they have heard of this issue.

Kevin