as the document is created in indesign then i strongly suggest making black pages “black” in the indesign file itself. just like acrobat, it has a similar separations preview. my advice is to go to a black page and toggle the black separation off. if colours other than black appear on the page, then they will need to be made black only. a good example of this may be a picture which appears black and white but is in fact RGB… in this case the picture will need to be opened, converted to greyscale, saved, and update in indesign.

otherwise, acrobat can force pages to greyscale using the advanced/print production/convert colors menu. assuming acrobat 9 is being used, open that menu item and look at the dialog box. in the centre left of the dialog box there will be a checkbox which says “convert colors to output intent”. click on this checkbox and in the dropdown field associated with it, click any one of the seven options at the bottom (dot gain 10% thru to gray gamma 2.2). in the checkboxes beneath this, only click the one which says “preserve black”, and in the dialog below, select the pages that these adjustments should be made to.

i'm completely with the OP here, this would be a handy script for anyone who wants to tidy up their indesign files, and i'd go several steps further to add the following options:

* change all registration type and fills to 100% K (when authors click the colour by mistake and don't see it in their seps)

* remove all unused layers

* add unnamed colors

* make RGB swatches CMYK

* remove unused images from pasteboard (not textboxes in case it is threaded to text used on a page… could be a disaster)

i have seen some scripts that do the above tasks (dave saunders has one to make RGB to CMYK but it makes R0G0B0 become C75M68Y67K90 instead of 100K) and Dirk Becker wrote one to delete all unused colors.

I did try the script from the above poster but it had trouble with CS4 unless i put the script into “version 4.0 scripts” folder and then it worked fine, don't know if it works under CS5.

but i'm absolutely with the OP on this, it'd be nice to have one script which would do the job, or a menu item such as “tidy up loose ends” (which could be made into a KBSC).

think i've come up with a solution…

i applied a stroke of thick-thick 3pt to all strokes in a table. works but leaves an undesirable big box around the outside. tried playing with various custom keylines to fix the overall table outline to no avail, so made a workaround. from there, made the text box fit the table, copied the text box and put to a layer above and removed the table, then applied a paper keyline to this empty textbox of 2pt.

it'll work PROVIDED you're happy with the “empty box” workaround to get rid of the ugly big outline around the whole table.

reminds me of the tax forms we see often here in australia. let us know if this is what you are after.

But — now the Index function doesn't work anymore! I get random page numbers left out, and if I check the relevant chapter in its own file, the references are all there; a mini-index of that chapter on itself works fine. I can clearly spot the missing pages in the overall index because the comma “between” is still there.

oh please no! i have a customer who, with my help, has set up a 300pg textbook in a similar fashion to jongware (indesign files into an indesign book file) and we're just at the indexing stage… don't tell me that the software is buggy!

i must admit that persuading my customer to upgrade from CS2 to CS4 has left me with egg on my face as:

1) it was installed on windows 7 and a rarely known bug about screen resolution can play games with trying to select items in indesign's dialog boxes and panels, causing us to lose a week of production until we worked out the solution;

2) the table styles don't work as well as they should and often don't behave (this is the abridged explanation of the problem)

3) now it looks like the index will be problematic. i have several scripts i can use to make the index in other ways BUT why should i have to? the software is meant to work.

look, indesign does plenty of the things i need it to do and some things that it doesn't do out of the box may be able to be scripted. sometimes there are bugs/glitches which have workarounds, but the index issue is a total progress stopper and has to be resolved by Adobe.

i'd suggest breaking the 4500 pg file up into 4500 single page pdfs and then named using bridge using the batch rename feature so that each page has a name something like 0046.pdf, 0047.pdf etc. from here, its possible to do what you want using data merge – a data file needs to be created manually.

this is how it CAN be done, but if i was doing this at my work i'd do an imposition in preps, then build a job ticket in the RIP and export either to the printer or a pdf file. whichever way it is created, it will still make a massive pdf file.

hope this makes sense.

the data merge function in indesign doesn't make “next record” merges like word does, but instead merges to fields within fixed text boxes, so one frame = one data merge result. when doing mailing labels in word, there is a field called “next record” which then calls in the next piece of information.

the “next record” field is a vital field which indesign doesn't have and i'd like… but that doesn't answer your question. i can see three ways of doing what you want to do:

1) do a mail merge in word and use the “catalog” feature and do the merge in word. format the word file appropriately using stylesheets, and once the merge is made, save the file and close it. THEN, place the file in indesign and then change the imported stylesheets into something which resembles more like what you want.

2) use indesign's data merge but make sure that multiple record layout is selected in the first dialog box when creating merged document; and that when previewing the records, the records appear to be in one column (even though they are still in separate text frames). merge the document, and in the new document, select all the text frames in the page and then run the MergeTextframes_ID.jsx script which can be found at https://ajarproductions.com/blo…..-indesign/ .this will have to be done page by page and then rethreaded each page, but it's a workaround

3) if the data in the datamerge is a csv, convert the csv to xml. if the csv is small (less than 100K) there is a converter online where the contents of the csv is copied into the converter. it is at https://www.creativyst.com/Prod/15/ . The next step is complicated and needs some knowledge of XML. my advice is to get hold of a book called “Designer's Guide to Adobe InDesign and XML” by James Maivald, and specifically read chapter seven and base your merge on this.

i hope this helps

colly