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Change text color except hyperlinks

Forum|Forum|3 years ago
September 6, 2022
4 replies
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I regularly get a Word document that needs to go into InDesign. The problem is that the "black" text is various shades of black and I need it all to be R0 G0 B0 but I don't want the blue color (R0 G0 B255) of the hyperlinks to be changed. Can anyone think of a script that could accomplish this?

Scripting

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Correct answer James Gifford—NitroPress

You can simply select all text, in Word or InDesign, and click the Black color swatch. That will reset or override all styles to black.

If you want to avoid spot overrides, make sure all styles are already set to Black. (Ideally, all the Word styles in use should be so configured, as well as the InDesign styles; you may have to clean this up at the Word stage on any received document.)

There are also methods to force-reapply styles throughout a document and remove any existing overrides to varying colors (even "other blacks.")

The blue of hyperlinks, in Word at least, is a live override, not a truly applied color. You can preserve the hyperlinks as a character style in ID and do pretty much anything you want with them in styling.

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Brad @ Roaring Mouse

Community Expert

If these colours have been added to your Colour List, simply select all the "extra" Word ones and delete them. e.g. select the weird "black" ones that you want to be consistent Black and delete that/those swatches. You will be asked to replace with another colour from your list, so, in your case, replace it with InDesign's "Black". You can also do the same for any weird RGB colours... like replace 100R0G0B with Red, etc. or whatever colours you want.

James Gifford—NitroPress

Legend

This, in general, on all Word imports. Word loves to create new color swatches at every turn, and taking a moment to delete all those not used and convert the rest to more standard(ized) swatches is good practice on any but the hastiest projects.

I find it useful to do this after doing most document cleanup, as that eliminates the use of many of these spot/ad-hoc colors and allows them to be simply deleted.

(I once had a 700-page book file that had been worked on for years. It had both hundreds of on-the-fly text styles and hundreds of spot color swatches...)

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brian_p_dts

Community Expert

Use the Find Color tool to find all the hyperlinks and apply a character style to them. Then apply a paragraph style with the correct black to all text.

James Gifford—NitroPressCorrect answer

Legend

You can simply select all text, in Word or InDesign, and click the Black color swatch. That will reset or override all styles to black.

If you want to avoid spot overrides, make sure all styles are already set to Black. (Ideally, all the Word styles in use should be so configured, as well as the InDesign styles; you may have to clean this up at the Word stage on any received document.)

There are also methods to force-reapply styles throughout a document and remove any existing overrides to varying colors (even "other blacks.")

The blue of hyperlinks, in Word at least, is a live override, not a truly applied color. You can preserve the hyperlinks as a character style in ID and do pretty much anything you want with them in styling.

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BarlaeDC

Community Expert

Hi ,

Couple of questions.

1. does the text get any styles attached to it?

2. Are the links are underlined? is anything else underlined?

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