PM sent, Tracy!

Will do

I'm having trouble loading a screenshot from my phone, but mine says

use region relative to page box
Place upper left of the region
Relative to upper left of media box
Offset X 0
Y 0
Width .25
Height .25
Inside region or overlapping region

The .25x.25 is the size of the region that you are specifying. Basically telling it that anything within or touching the top left quarter inch of the media box (or whatever box you specify) is what gets selected. In this case the region is purposely small to avoid other objects being selected. 

Glad you got it working! I used a similar method today to move some footers away from the trim on a bunch of pages. 

OK, had a few minutes to look at your latest PDF. I also had to re-read this entire thread to remember what the heck I even told you to do!

If the dieline isn't getting deleted, I'm thinking it might be because of how you are referencing the region - there is no Trim Box in this PDF, so if you are using that as the reference it might not work. Try changing to Media Box. I made a quick action that selects anything overlapping the top left of the Media Box .25x.25 and it successfully deletes just the dieline on each page.

If the color change is what's not working, it might be because the dieline in this PDF is RGB so the Remap to Channel doesn't get it done. Instead you can make the action do a Convert Color instead. I converted to a Spot Color and had good results. You can use the same Select By Region as the first step.

I'm typing this on my phone so I can't upload screenshots or the actions I made - can't remember my password to log in on my work machine and don't want to reset it!

The reason for the color change as a first step was to see what is going to be deleted in the next step. Just a way of checking for undesired collateral damage. 

I'm off til Monday so can't look at it til then. 

Quote from: DigiCorn on 7/9/2024, 3:57:51 PMOK. That worked... but it copied the file name and not the field contents of the pdf, which is what I really need.This would be great if the customer had named the file with the name of the recipient, and not some random initials (which don't even match the name).

Correct - this is just a way to use Data Merge to place all the PDFs into an InDesign document so you wouldn't have to manually place them like you did.

One of my favorite uses for this trick is on a VDP job I used to do that had hundreds of headshot photos. Not every sales rep had a photo and the design was different for those without so I needed an easy way to compare my photo list to the data to see who didn't have a photo. 

Copied the file listing of the photos from the Finer into an Excel column, and in a second column was the list of reps from the data. There's a way you can tell Excel to highlight entries that don't exist in both columns and it doesn't care what order they are in. Makes it easy to see what reps are missing photos. 

Weird. I've literally done it hundreds of times. Maybe I glossed over a step - have to have an open Excel doc and your cursor in a cell.  

You can also paste into a text editor like BBEdit. Don't try with TextEdit, though, because it will paste the actual files instead of the names. 

No typing required. Get all the PDFs in a folder, select all, copy. Open Excel and paste. It will paste the file names. 

Another option for getting them all into one InDesign doc is to use Data Merge and treat it like a variable data job. You would just need to create a list of the file names (easily done) and use that as a data file and pull in the PDFs as a variable image.

If they all live in different directories that might be a problem, but maybe you copy them somewhere to get them in one folder.

(I know you already solved your problem - just spitballing for next time!)

To remap to Separation, you use the Remap Color step and map to "color" and then choose "separation" just below that.

I'd include a screenshot but my phone isn't playing nice.

That's a lot of cock!

I like henway.