InkLegend

One click. One legend. Zero "wait, which inks are in this file?" messages.

Every prepress operator knows the ritual: open the file, dig through swatches, squint at layers, count the inks, type them into an email, miscount, repeat. InkLegend does the counting for you.

Run the script and a tidy dark strip appears on your artboard: one card per ink — process, spot and technical — plus a big TOTAL INKS number. It's built from the colors that are actually used in the document, not from the forgotten swatches that have been hanging around in the panel since the last millennium.

It's a single .jsx file for Adobe Illustrator. No installer, no account, no subscription, no network access. Free, MIT-licensed, and made to save a few minutes (and a few nerves) on every job.

What you get

• Only the inks that are really used. An unused swatch doesn't make it into the legend.
• Process / Spot / Tech sections. CMYK channels, spot colors, and "technical" colors (film, foil, die lines and other things that never meet ink) are sorted for you. Technical colors are shown but not counted.
• A total ink count you can trust (process channels + spot colors).
• Black as a PANTONE spot, in one click. Many jobs print black as its own spot ink; tick the box and K moves to the SPOT section as PBlack — no dummy swatch to add and delete afterwards.
• Your logo on the strip, embedded in the file, so it looks the same on every colleague's computer.
• Date and file name under the strip.
• Safe to re-run. Edit the artwork, run it again: the old legend is replaced, not duplicated.

Install

1. Download src/InkLegend.jsx.
2. Pick one:
   • Run it once, no install: File > Scripts > Other Script... and choose InkLegend.jsx.
   • Install it: copy the file into Illustrator's Scripts folder and restart Illustrator. It will appear under File > Scripts > InkLegend.
     • Mac: /Applications/Adobe Illustrator <version>/Presets.localized/<locale>/Scripts/
     • Windows: C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Illustrator <version>\Presets\<locale>\Scripts\ (not tested by the author)
   • One-click launch: see below.

One-click launch with JSX Launcher

If you run InkLegend all day, going through the menus gets old. JSX Launcher is a panel on Adobe Exchange that shows a button for every .jsx file in a folder you choose (it opens from the Window menu, under Extensions). Drop InkLegend.jsx into that folder and it's one click away.

It's a third-party tool, not part of this project, and an older one (version 0.1.6, 2019) — check that it works with your version of Illustrator.

Usage

1. Open a document in Illustrator and run the script.
2. In the dialog, review the detected colors, uncheck anything you don't want in the legend, set the font, and optionally pick a logo.
3. Click Generate Legend. A grouped object named InkLegend is placed in the top-right corner of the active artboard, 10 mm from the edges.
4. Changed the artwork? Run it again. The previous InkLegend group is removed and a fresh one is drawn.

Settings

• Company Name — used in the optional notice above the strip: tick Spot Colors added by … and the legend says "Spot Colors are Recommended by …".
• Logo file — a logo (.ai, .pdf, .eps, .png, .jpg) shown at the left of the strip. Use Browse... to pick it. Leave it empty (or point it at a missing file) and a "LOGO" placeholder box is drawn instead. After the legend is generated the logo is embedded (not linked), so the document doesn't depend on the logo file being present on another computer. A vector logo stays vector.
• Font — any font installed in Illustrator, used for the whole legend.
• Technical color names — a comma-separated list of swatch names that should be treated as technical (non-printing) rather than as a real ink, e.g. film, transparency, foil, substrate, t. Entries of 1–2 characters must match the whole swatch name; longer ones match by prefix. In the swatch name, case, spaces, underscores and hyphens are ignored — so write the entry without them: diecut matches a swatch called Die Cut.
• Black as PANTONE Black (spot) — moves black (CMYK K, a gray fill, or a swatch named Black) from PROCESS to a PBlack card in SPOT, and counts it in TOTAL INKS. Nothing is added to the document's swatches. Greyed out when the file has no black.

Your choices are remembered between runs, per computer, in ~/Library/Application Support/InkLegend/InkLegend_settings.json (macOS) or %APPDATA%\InkLegend\InkLegend_settings.json (Windows).

How colors are detected

InkLegend reads fills, strokes and text colors of visible objects on every layer and sublayer of the active document (including objects inside groups).

• Process: a CMYK channel is offered only if some object actually uses it; a gray fill counts as K. Swatches named Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, Black or C=… M=… Y=… K=… are treated as process too.
• Spot: every spot color used in the artwork (except [Registration]). Note that global process swatches are swatches too, so they are listed here as well.
• Not detected: colors that exist only inside gradients, patterns, symbols, meshes, or placed/raster images. If a color hides there, put a tiny vector rectangle filled with that swatch somewhere in the document and it will show up.
• Names: PANTONE 485 C is shortened to P485 C to keep the cards compact.

Compatibility

Developed and tested on macOS with Adobe Illustrator 2026, on CMYK documents. It's plain ExtendScript with no dependencies, so other recent versions and Windows should work, but that's untested — reports welcome.

Feedback

Found a bug or have an idea? Open an issue. This is a spare-time project, so replies may take a while. Pull requests are welcome; keep the code ES3-compatible (Illustrator's ExtendScript is old: no let, const, arrow functions or Array.map).

License

MIT — see LICENSE. Provided as is, without warranty.

Adobe and Illustrator are trademarks of Adobe Inc.; PANTONE® is a trademark of Pantone LLC. This project is not affiliated with or endorsed by either company.