InDesign for QuarkXPress Users [Electronic resources]

Importing Colors

There are a number of other ways to add colors to your document besides adding them from a library. While InDesign does not have an Append feature like XPress, it does let you grab colors from other documents: In the New Color Swatch dialog box, you can choose Other Library from the Color Mode popup menu and select another InDesign document or an EPS file from Illustrator 8 or earlier (later versions of Illustrator won't work because they use a different format). Then, in the dialog box that next appears, select the colors to add as described above.

Of course, when you open a PageMaker or QuarkXPress document the colors are imported automatically. And as in XPress, when you import an EPS file, InDesign adds the graphic's spot colors (if there are any) to the Swatches palette; InDesign does the same when you place an Illustrator file, even including the named tints and gradients. Copying objects from one InDesign document to another copies the named swatches, too.

Even cooler, you can copy one or more swatches from one document to another by dragging: Open the two documents side by side and make the Swatches palette in the source document visible. Select the swatches in the source document (Shift-click for contiguous swatches or Command/Ctrl-click for discontiguous swatches), and then drag the selected swatches onto the target document window.