converting spot colours to cmyk

[SerayaH@adobeforums.com]

Hi,

I am trying to convert a drawing with a whole heap of spot colours to cmyk. I selected everything and then used the filter menu to convert to cmyk. I got the error saying that it wouldn't convert gradients or patterns, so I had to go back and convert these manually. When I went to the swatches pallette, then select all unused swatches it selected all the pantone colours except one. I deleted the unused spot colours at this stage

I assumed that there must be some part of the drawing that is still using this spot colour that remained in the swatches pallette, so I drew a rectangle filled with the spot colour, then went select same fill colour - this didn't select anything, but when I went select same stroke colour it selected a whole lot of the drawing. The thing is that I know that the parts that it's selecting are definitely not stroked with this colour.

The pantone colour still remains in the swatches pallette and is importing with the picture when I place it in InDesign.

I don't know why this is happening and I really need to make sure the whole drawing is converted to CMYK.

Can anyone help out here?

Seraya

[Dee Holmes]

Is there any hidden locked layers in the file? Also trashing the spot color will convert the object to CMYK. But you need to be carefull about that if it is involved in a gradient.

I recently experienced gradient shifts if deleting the spot color was in a gradient.

[SerayaH@adobeforums.com]

There aren't any locked layers. I'm also worried about the gradients as you said - is there any reason why Illustrator isn't removing the spot swatches from the pallette even though there is none left in the drawing?

Or could a corrupt file cause this?

[Larry_G._Schneider@adobeforums.com]

Seraya,

Have you cleaned out the Symbol, Style, Brush and Swatch palettes (in that order)? The spot color could be being used in one of these palette swatches.

Larry

[Dee Holmes]

Or there could be a spot color with a percentage of zero that you think is white.

[allenatl@adobeforums.com]

Try double-clicking the spot color swatch and changing the Color Type from Spot Color to Process Color. Then it will at least separate as process even though it's still in the swatch list.

[SerayaH@adobeforums.com]

I just tried cleaning out the pallettes suggested but with no luck. There may be a spot colour with a zero percentage but I can't find it. I didn't do the drawing originally, so I wouldn't know where to start to look.

When I double click the pantone colour in the swatches pallette and change the colour type from spot to process, the little white triange in the bottom right corner of the swatch still remains - does this mean it's still essentially a spot colour?

I thought that changing the colour type would change everything that was previously coloured with the spot colour to a process colour, but the white triangle is confusing me.

Any ideas?

[allenatl@adobeforums.com]

The white triangle identifies the swatch color as global, meaning that if you edit the swatch it will update that color everywhere in the file, but it is a process color. If it were a spot color, it would show a dot inside the triangle.
If none of your swatches show a dot inside the triangle, then your file should now print as all CMYK. Hope this helps.

[SerayaH@adobeforums.com]

Thanks everyone for your help.