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Illustrator Tutorial 0006 - Solution to the "More than 27 spot colors and transparency" Printing Error

If you get an error message in Illustrator CS 2 when you try to print to our postscript printers, there is a fairly simple solution. In Illustrator CS 1, this error usually showed up as "Can't Print Illustration." Helpful, right? With CS 2, we finally have an informative error message that not only tells us what the problem actually is, but also gives us a clue as to how to fix it!

They aren't kidding about this, either. I tried. Twenty-seven colors and transparency prints fine. Add one more spot color, and you get this lovely error. So, how do we fix it? That's easy. Obviously, you won't want to remove your transparencies, so we have to convert the spot colors to process colors.

1. Identifying a spot color in your swatches palette: It has a small black dot at the lower right corner of the swatch.

2. Double-click one of your spot colors.

3. In the dialog box, change the pull-down menu from "Spot Color" to "Process Color". Click OK.

That's it! Seriously! Repeat this for the excess spot colors.

But what if that pull-down menu is grayed out?

4. If the pull-down menu is grayed out, change the color mode from "Book Color" to any of the others. Now you should be able to select "Process Color".

Save your file and print!