🚀 go-pugleaf

maxdunn--

Ah, I see. Well, we can't open the color libraries via scripting, nor can we import colors. That said, there are two approaches you can take:

1. Make a spot color as shown above. Give it the CMYK values and color name of the PANTONE spot you want to use, and set its Model to idSpotColor. There's nothing magical about the spot color definitions in the library--all that's required is that your commercial printer knows that a specific plate gets smeared with the correct ink formulation.

2. The color libraries are Illustrator files, and are, therefore, plain text. You can have your script open and read the text files directly, extract the color values you want, and add the color to your document.

Here's an example of the second approach. This example uses the FileSystemObject, so you'll need to add the Microsoft Scripting Runtime library to your VB project.



Rem Get a color from a color library 
Dim myInDesign As InDesign.Application 
Dim myFileSystemObject As FileSystemObject 
Dim myColorLibraryFile As TextStream 
Dim myColor As InDesign.Color 
Dim myColorLibraryFileName As String 
Dim myColorName As String 
Dim myColorList As String 
Dim myColorDefinition As String 
Dim myLineStart As Long 
Dim myLineEnd As Long 
Dim myColorArray() As String 
Rem Enter the file path for the color library you want to open. 
myColorLibraryFileName = "C:\Program Files\Adobe\InDesign 2.0\Swatch Libraries\PANTONE Solid Coated.ai" 
Rem Enter the name of the color you're looking for. 
myColorName = "PANTONE 274 C" 
Set myFileSystemObject = CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject") 
Set myColorLibraryFile = myFileSystemObject.OpenTextFile(myColorLibraryFileName) 
myColorList = myColorLibraryFile.ReadAll 
Rem Various string manipulations to extract the color 
Rem definition from the (very large) string. 
myColorLocation = InStr(1, myColorList, myColorName) 
myLineEnd = InStr(myColorLocation, myColorList, vbCr) 
myLineStart = InStrRev(myColorList, "%%", myLineEnd) 
myColorDefinition = Mid(myColorList, myLineStart, myLineEnd - myLineStart) 
myColorList = "" 
Rem At this point, we have a string that looks like this: 
Rem %%+1.00 1.00 0.00 0.28 (PANTONE 274 C) 
Rem More string manipulations follow. 
myColorDefinition = Replace(myColorDefinition, "%%+", "") 
myColorDefinition = Replace(myColorDefinition, " (" & myColorName & ")", "") 
myColorArray = Split(myColorDefinition, " ") 
Rem Our work here is done--we've got the color values we want. 
Set myInDesign = CreateObject("InDesign.Application.2.0") 
Set myDocument = myInDesign.ActiveDocument 
Set myColor = myDocument.Colors.Add 
myColor.Name = myColorName 
Rem Model determines process/spot 
myColor.Model = idSpotColor 
Rem Color model can be cmyk, rgb, or lab 
myColor.Space = idCMYKcolor 
myColor.ColorValue = Array(CDbl(myColorArray(0)) * 100, CDbl(myColorArray(1)) * 100, CDbl(myColorArray(2)) * 100, CDbl(myColorArray(3)) * 100) 




Note that you could get multiple colors using similar techniques. I really hate loading that large a string into a buffer, but it works reasonably quickly.

Thanks,

Ole