InDesign Tips: Replacing Gradient Swatches and Improving EPS Previews
The comparison between InDesign and Illustrator has often been noted. “If you’re familiar with Illustrator, you can use InDesign” goes the common wisdom. But if you’re not an Illustrator user, you may not be aware of InDesign’s hidden power. One such timesaving feature is the ability to replace color swatches in a gradient fill.
Another Illustrator-related feature in InDesign is the ability to see high-quality EPS previews. These two tips from Adobe InDesign Evangelist Tim Cole show you how to access both of these features.
We’ve posted these tips as PDF files. All you do is click “Replacing Gradient Colors with a Swatch” and “Better .eps Previews” to open the PDF files in your Web browser. You can also download the PDFs to your machine for later viewing.
This article was last modified on March 10, 2025
This article was first published on May 9, 2003
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Better eps preview — 2 questions… 1. Is this better or different than right-clicking image andchoosing “Display performanceHigh-quality Display”?2. Why would you use an eps rather than an .ai file??
Bret, this was actually written back in 2003, when EPS files were much more common and InDesign not as powerful. Today, using AI files and using the high quality display is far better. More on that topic here: https://indesignsecrets.com/tiff-vs-psd-vs-eps-vs-pdf-vs.php
All links are working now.
Terri Stone
Editor in Chief, CreativePro.com
“Page Not Found”
Check the URLs, there is some duplicate code in the links.
The tip to replace color stops in a gradient swatch is to select a color stop, then hold down the Option/Alt key when clicking a new color in the Swatches panel.
The tips are provided in PDF documents: they could much more easily have been in HTML. Dowloading a PDF to read a couple of paragraphs is a waste of bandwidth. Also, the how-to-view-in-your-browser links are to stale-dated Adobe pages: the Mac/Explorer page is OS 9 only, and the Mac/Netscape page is OS 9 only and only covers up to Navigator v4. In my opinion this page serves solely to promote Acrobat and does so quite badly. Unless Adobe are equity investors in creativepro, I would strongly suggest you ask them to rewrite this page in HTML, or at the very least update their info pages on their website.