194 Using Ink Manager before sending your project to the printer

- Talk to any printer and they'll tell you designers are forever sending them PDF and InDesign files with spot colors, when they really wanted process colors. So please, do yourself and your printer and everyone around you a favor and do two things. First, learn to work with spot colors properly. I talk about this in great detail in my course "InDesign Insider Training: Working with Color" here in the online training library. And second, and even more important, open the Ink Manager each and every time you export a PDF or send a file to a print provider.

You can find the Ink Manager in five different places inside InDesign. The easiest way is just to go to the Swatches panel click on the Swatches panel menu and way down here at the bottom is Ink Manager. But Ink Manager also appears in the Separations Preview panel menu the Export PDF dialog box, the Export EPS dialog box, and the Print dialog box, as a button. Make sure you know all the places that you can find Ink Manager. That said, it doesn't matter where you choose it from, they all go to the same place, this dialog box.

Now the Ink Manager lets you do all kinds of things, including aliasing one spot color to another, and managing trapping sequences and it's very rare you'd need to worry about the trapping stuff, but it's very common that you need to think about one other thing that this Ink Manager does, and that is converting spots to process colors. Now, the first thing that you should do when you open the Ink Manager dialog box is scroll through this list of inks up here at the top. This shows you all the different inks in your document. Not the swatches or colors but specifically inks.

That is, if you printed color separations right now, how many plates would probably come out? Now the four process colors are always there at the top and they're followed by spot colors. If you didn't expect any spot colors at all, then this list might come as a shock. But, as I said earlier, printers often open people's documents and they find not just a couple but a dozen or more spot colors. That's bad! So, what do you do if you have spot colors in this list and you didn't want them? Well, you can convert a single spot color to a process color by clicking in a column to the left of the color.

That converts it to a process color. Now note this does not change the color swatch. It just signals to InDesign that this color should be converted to process whenever you print or export to a CMYK format. Alternatively, you can convert all your spot colors to process by selecting this check box down here, All Spots to Process. Then, click OK. By the time you're ready to print or export a PDF, I know you're tired and you think you know your document well enough, but as I said, it's always a good idea to check Ink Manager.

It just takes a moment to look over, and it can save you and your printer a lot of time and headache.