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I'm recording an Action in Illustrator for my Plate Making process. I'm new to Actions but so far so good. The action is quite simple. I'm supplied a 1 colour file. The file is opened and the first step is to select all, create outlines, scale a vertical % and then lastly - change everything to 1 colour black.

I'm stuck on the 1 colour black part. How do I get this to occur. I can't do select same fill/stroke/fill&stroke because different things have different values. I just need to be able to have the action finish by grabbing the whole artwork and changing the colour from whatever it is now to Spot Black. Both Fill and Strokes need to be automatically changed to have Spot Black as their colour without messing with their original values eg: stroke weight, colour % etc.

Any tips or help would be much appreciated.

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  • If it’s all one colour originally, can’t you just redefine the swatch or (if it’s not a swatch at all) use the recolouring function to change it in one go in the entire document?
    – Janus Bahs Jacquet
    Dec 10, 2020 at 14:57

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
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  • Select all
  • Choose Edit > Edit Colors > Convert to Greyscale

BAM! 1 color black.

You can add this step to any action, it is recordable.

Difficulty may come then from the fact that greyscale, while one color black, may not do the artwork justice due to auto-conversion values. You may need to then use the Recolor Artwork feature to further refine the greyscale. Unfortunately, Recolor Artwork is not recordable as an action. Usage would be greatly dependent upon the artwork in every file.

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