The InDesign Swatch Library Will Not Load

The Adobe Creative Suite applications, including Adobe InDesign, support industry-standard color libraries of press-friendly colors you can load into the software as sets of clickable color chips. Unlike its siblings in the Creative Suite, Adobe InDesign doesn't load whole sets of colors into a floating panel. When InDesign appears unable to load swatches, consider these scenarios to understand how the application works and evaluate whether you have a software problem.

Creative Suite Applications

Adobe Illustrator presents you with a long list of color chips in each of the color systems it supports. When you load a color library into the program, it appears in a floating panel for your perusal. Although Adobe Photoshop's color-selection interface offers a similarly swatch-based system, each of Photoshop's libraries stays on your screen only long enough for you to make a choice, then disappears when you click on its "OK" button. If you base your expectations of Adobe InDesign's behavior on Illustrator's paradigm rather than Photoshop's, you may think InDesign's behavior points to a software problem.

How InDesign Libraries Work

When you add colors to the Swatches panel in an Adobe InDesign document, you select from a dialog box designed for making one-at-a-time choices. The New Color Swatch dialog box lets you choose a color type -- spot or process -- and a color mode. The color-mode drop-down menu provides a long list of proprietary color systems, including ANPA, DIC, HKS, Pantone Toyo, Trumatch and Web-safe color. Once you choose a color mode, the set of swatches for that library stays accessible on screen only long enough for you to make your selection.

"Load Swatches" Option

Adobe InDesign's Swatches panel includes a fly-out menu at the top right corner to provide options, among them the choice to "Load Swatches." Especially if you're familiar with the way Adobe Illustrator handles color, this option sounds like it should open a floating color-swatch panel on your screen. On the contrary: it's actually the gateway to colors stored in other InDesign files and documents saved from other applications in the Adobe Creative Suite.

ASE Files

The Adobe Swatch Exchange file format enables you to load the colors in a file written by one Adobe Creative Suite application into a file created in another application in the suite. The ASE format also provides a way to share your personally constructed color libraries with other people in a work group or production environment. To create an ASE document, you export the colors in your current layout or artwork file. When you choose "Load Swatches" from the Adobe InDesign Swatches panel menu, the program expects you to load an ASE file and displays an error message if you choose other types of documents, including color libraries.

Expectations

If you're using Adobe InDesign's swatch libraries as they're designed and taking advantage of the ASE file format to share color libraries with colleagues, you shouldn't have any trouble accessing color information from InDesign's resources. When InDesign doesn't behave as you expect, reset your application preferences. If that doesn't solve your problem, you may need to uninstall and reinstall your software. Before you undertake drastic measures, make sure your InDesign installation is up-to-date with Adobe's latest software patches.

References

• Adobe Systems: Using Adobe InDesign CS5 & CS5.5
• "Real World InDesign CS5"; Olav Martin Kvern, et al.; 2010
• "InDesign CS5 Bible"; Galen Gruman; 2010