Colour of text in linked box?

[Shaw_Jeffrey@adobeforums.com]

Sorry - I am sure this is just me being stupid - I have just started looking at InDesign today and tried the Tutorials. Not so helpful IMHO, especially when they refer to buttons and controls without showing you an illustration so you can identify them!

I have a series of linked text boxes and want to change the colour of the text in one of them, such that I can continiue to edit and reflow the text afterwards. At the moment it appears I have to reselect the relevant text and colour it each time the flow changes, which is silly. What is the trick to make the text format icon in the toolbar available with linked boxes?

[Dave_Saunders@adobeforums.com]

I don't completely understand what you're trying to do. You seem to be saying that you have a linked story and you want to change the color of some text in a text frame, but then carry on editing the text.

Did I follow so far?

What I'm not getting is what you want to have happen when the editing causes the text in the frame to change. Are you expecting the new text in the frame to take on the color and for the text that gets pushed out of the frame to revert to its earlier color?

If so, then you're asking for a lot, but it can be done using a particular set of transparency features and some overlaying rectangles.

Here's how to do it:

1. Use Registration color for your text.
2. Use Paper color for the fill of your text frames.
3. Duplicate each text frame in the whole story, empty it and change its contents to unassigned (a script could do this stage -- also use an object style once you've done the first one).
4. Apply the color you want for the text to the fill of these new rectangles, each of which should be sitting exactly over the top of the frames. At this point, you can't see any of your text.
5. Change the transparency of the rectangles (by editing the object style) to apply Lighten.

But be very careful that you do this for all the text, you don't want any of it to end up as Registration at the end of the process.

If that's not what you're trying to do, can you restate the problem please.

Dave

[Shaw_Jeffrey@adobeforums.com]

Thanks, Dave. To be honest this is not even a current project but just something i thought I ought to be able to do while working through the tutorial. The idea is to have a story that goes over several pages but where one of the pages has a full colour background image behind the text, so that all the text on that page has to be white (paper). I know I could format that text by hand, but I thought I should be able to continue editing the text afterwards while specifying that the text in just that one frame should have a special colour. If that isn't supposed to be possible, fine, but I am surprised!

[Dave_Saunders@adobeforums.com]

It is possible, as I've just shown, but it is very unusual because you're calling for dynamic recoloring of text. One moment it's black (or whatever), the next it is white, and you weren't even looking at it at the time but at some other page in the document.

Dave

[Shaw_Jeffrey@adobeforums.com]

Hmmm... when I followed your instructions I found that the image below the text was obscured by using 'paper' as the fill for the original frames. Also I was unable to see how to set the colour of the overlying frames to white ('paper' doesn't work) but I chose yellow just for the sake of the experiment. It's an ingenious method but it doesn't seem to do what I was wanting. Don't worry though - as I said I was only really posing a hypothetical case, and if there is not obvious solution I shall have to get by without!

Thanks again.

[David_Burdette@adobeforums.com]

I'm with Jeffrey. I'm trying to do the same thing and I haven't figured it out either w/o attempting to do the intricate steps Dave S. outllined.

Actually, I would think this is a common issue. If you're laying out a graphically rich magazine (WIRED for example), the first page of your story might be white text over some colored illustration and then as the rest of the story continues on subsequent pages, the text needs to be in black, let's say.

If your text is set in stone, sure you can color text on pg 1 to be white and pg 2 to be black but I would think that if it needed to be edited, then the text should change dynamically.

[Shaw_Jeffrey@adobeforums.com]

Hi David - quite so... I've just had a look at Quark and it seems you can't do it there either. How do the professionals manage?

[Dave_Saunders@adobeforums.com]

They do it the hard way.

My first reaction to this was "who would ever need that?" but I've warmed to the idea considerably. I recommend posting a feature request here:

<http://www.adobe.com/support/feature.html>

Dave