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I have a PDF with a complex vector drawing that contains only two colors.  I need to separate the objects by color in order to produce printing plates separately for each color (doing photopolymer plates for letterpress printing).  Is there a way to use Affinity Designer to create two separate files each containing all the objects of a single color?  After that, I need to turn all the objects black but I think that's the easy part.  

 

I realize that I could separately select each object and delete it based on its color but there are many thousands of objects in the drawing and this feels like a needless use of human labor to do something that computers are naturally better at.

 

Thanks,

 

Chris

 

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Hmm, for AD can't tell here. - But AFAIK tools like Acrobat Pro, InDesign and QXP etc. allow to preview, print and partly also to save sepated color PDFs, so take a look here:

 

18 hours ago, cmoore said:

I realize that I could separately select each object and delete it based on its color but there are many thousands of objects in the drawing and this feels like a needless use of human labor to do something that computers are naturally better at.

Well if you find a way in AD to automatically select just all vector objects and layers which are involved here to be of a certain color, than you can force to do the desired separation process that way. But I'm not aware of any such color dependent multi selection possibility on the vector side, just on the pixel side aka when working with bitmaps.

On the other hand here what probably would be possible to do is, to export into some text editable vector format (SVG, EPS/PS), make a file working copy and then remove in a text editor all objects of just one specific color there (as far as those color objects are clearly matchable via some well defined regular expression search/remove). Save the modified file and then reimport it into AD, then check in AD that everything is as you expect it to be, namely that only all those objects of one color are inside etc.

Plain simple and stupid SVG example here ...

Quote

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="no"?>
<!DOCTYPE svg PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD SVG 1.1//EN" "http://www.w3.org/Graphics/SVG/1.1/DTD/svg11.dtd">
<svg width="100%" height="100%" viewBox="0 0 800 1280" version="1.1" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" xml:space="preserve" xmlns:serif="http://www.serif.com/" style="fill-rule:evenodd;clip-rule:evenodd;stroke-linejoin:round;stroke-miterlimit:1.41421;">
    <rect x="76" y="50" width="72" height="70" style="fill:rgb(202,74,74);"/>
    <rect x="299" y="50" width="73" height="85" style="fill:rgb(74,64,181);"/>
    <rect x="112" y="296" width="54" height="55" style="fill:rgb(73,64,181);"/>
    <rect x="335.5" y="296" width="64.5" height="55" style="fill:rgb(73,64,181);"/>
    <rect x="568" y="382" width="78" height="54" style="fill:rgb(202,74,74);"/>
    <rect x="148" y="565" width="105" height="75" style="fill:rgb(73,64,181);"/>
    <rect x="550" y="691" width="96" height="69" style="fill:rgb(202,74,74);"/>
</svg>

Good luck!

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