How to change text colour in one of several threaded text boxes?

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    • #69858
      Chris Haw
      Member

      Dear community,

      [ *Disclaimer: I am not a particularly experienced InDesign user, and although I try my best to become better through reading aup stuff, please, should the question be stupid, forgive me for that. :) * ]

      InDesign CS5 on Win7

      Despite searching for quite some time now I have not been able to find the right solution for the following problem:

      I would like the paragraph style (more precisely: the text coulour) to change, once the text flows into a particular text frame of several threaded text frames. My original idea was to apply a particular object style to this particular text frame only, but this does not appear to work.

      The reason why I would like to do so is that I am writing and layouting a couple of travel report articles (in a non-professional environment, but still seeking to reach a good quality), with the text partly flowing over background images in certain columns or on certain pages. In the respective text boxes the font colour would need to change to white instead of black. This should depend on the text frame itself only (because that defines the location over the image) and not on the paragraph as such (which obviously will move in threaded text frames, once any chagnes occur somewhere else), which is why I cannot apply the paragraph style as such to the text itself.

      However, it appears that object styles don’t work for threaded text frames with regards to the paragraph style in a particular text frame only (nothing happens). Am I doing something wrong, or if no, is there another, possibly more elegant solution for this problem? I suppose the need to change text colour in threaded text frames must occur frequently in professional layouting, hence I suppose there must be a solution and that I was simply using the wrong keywords when searching.

      Any help on this would be most appreciated!
      Chris

    • #69884
      Eugene Tyson
      Member

      Well if your text is all threaded and it’s a paragraph and you apply a different paragraph style – the entire paragraph will change.

      An Object Style only allows Paragraph Styles, not Character Styles, therefore your threaded text frames are applied a Paragraph Style which turns all paragraphs it’s attached to “white text”.

      There is a clever way to do this – although I don’t recall all the steps – I’ll see if I can dig it out of some internet searches.

    • #69885
      Chris Haw
      Member

      Hi Eugene, thanks for your reply.

      Actually, it is of course true what you write about paragraph styles, but I am working with many different paragraphs and the text boxes in question hold complete paragraphs, so to this point it should work in theory.

      Another day of using search engines has brought me to the point where I have some more threads by authors having the same issue, and the result was that all answers I have found to this point are: there is no official way to achieve this; and there is one (not ideal) work-around: apply “drop inner shadow” effect to the text box to drop a (super-large, in order to avoid grey zone) black inner into the text which will work as black text fill.

      If anybody comes up with a more elegant solution, I will be more than happy!

      Thanks so far!
      trinc

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