Finding spot color and process color

Question

Dear all,
I used the following code to find the spot color used in the document.
var length=app.activeDocument.spots.length;
for(i=0;i<length;i++){
alert(app.activeDocument.spots[i].color);
It is showing CMYK Color as the output.
Can anyone tell me wheather it is a correct output.I want to identify all the spot color in the current active document.
Also please help me finding out the Process color used in the document.What is the diffence between these two ?
Regards,
Sanat

Answer 1

Sanat,
Even if a color is Spot, it still has to have CMYK or RGB values (depending on the color mode of the document) to tell Illustrator what color to display it as.
Beyond that, though, you're going to run into another problem anyway: Any Swatch that is defined as Global is going to be counted as a Spot Color. (I've been complaining about this for years.)
For example:
var docRef=app.activeDocument;
var count=docRef.spots.length;
alert(count);
for(i=0;i<count;i++){
alert(docRef.spots[i].name);
Run that in a CMYK document in which you have removed all unused palette items. You'll find that it returns [Registration] as a spot color, just because it's set to Global. Now doubleClick the Black Swatch. Set it to Global (but not Spot). The sript will tell you there are two Spot colors.
JET