Hidden Add Swatch Capability
An Adobe engineer has revealed that, unknown to almost all of us, InDesign CS and CS2 have a hidden capability to add a color swatch while editing styles. Imagine this: You’re in the Paragraph Styles palette defining a new paragraph style for a subhead in your publication, and you’d like to color the text a Pantone color.
But wait! As you can see in the illustration, you haven’t created or imported the swatch color you need for that color. That means cancelling out of your dialog, going to the Swatches palette and defining or importing the Pantone color there, then returning to the Paragraph Styles palette, right?
No, all you have to do is double-click on the fill or stroke proxy to the left of the color list, and it reveals the New Color Swatch dialog box!
Just pick Pantone Solid Coated from the Color Mode list, select your color, click Add, and then Done, and you’re back in the Paragraph Styles dialog. The new color has now been added to your color swatches, and you can select it from the Character Color list.
I found that this undocumented feature works in the Paragraph Styles and Character Styles palettes. In the Object Styles palette, I couldn’t get it to work to define a Fill or Stroke, but, strangely, I could pick a Drop Shadow color. It would be nice to see this added to other parts of the InDesign interface. And also documented so someone other than an engineer could find it!
Very nice, Steve! I have often grumbled about the fact that swatches had to be defined before opening the style dialogs. This is a killer tip!
I’m inclined to double-click everything in sight these days to see what happens. It’s was only last week that I learned that double-clicking an in- or out-port on a threaded text frame splits the thread. And now this!
Dave
I also like to try Option/Alt-clicking controls to see if there are any other options. You can never tell what those programmers might have added.
Awesome. Simply awesome.
And, why do we need the color palette?
Anne-Marie, you were right on last week.
Very cool indeed! But …
when I showed this to a colleague he said, isn’t that how one does it? I have always done that. Grrrrrrr
Gerd
OH! Now this is sooo useful! Wow, thanks. And as an aside, don’t get rid of the color palette – like to play with it, see the results live on my subject and only when I’m satisfied with it make a swatch of it.
-T
Hey Steve, this is a great little time-saver. I found it does work for new Object Styles fill, but not for stroke. So the work-around would be to double-click on the fill, click OK and with your dialog box still open, then select stroke and your new colour will be there to use.
Thanks for getting me to look at that again. It actually works for BOTH fills and strokes, but NOT when you have None selected.
When in doubt…double-click.
Thank you sooooo much!g