How can I change the color of a BULLET character, not the color of the text?

[Lew Yedwab, Resideo]

I'm updating some minor details in the English and French versions of a document that was last worked on about 4 years ago. 

The English version of the document has the simple black arrowhead-shaped bullets seen in the attached screenshots. 

The French version of the document has the same arrowhead-shaped bullets, but they're blue. 

Maddeningly, the format looks exactly the same. Obviously, I'm not looking in the right place to make these bullet characters black in the French version of the document. 

Any help would be greatly appreciated! Greatly appreciated...

[Dave Creamer of IDEAS · Accepted solution]

It would be your Webdings character style that has the blue color setting. 

[Bob_Niland]

If you ever need to flow that document to HTML, or perhaps an eBook format, that triangle won't work at all. It will be rendered as “4”, due to using that old overlay/codepage font substitution. Even if someone copies the text out of a PDF today, it will usually paste as “4”.

Consider removing the Character Format from the Autonumber Format and instead using a native Unicode right-pointing triangle, perhaps:
▶ U+25B6 Black Right-pointing Triangle
▸ U+25B8 Black Right-pointing Small Triangle

For the former example, this would be an AN Format of:
[\u25b6\t]
which will collapse to
[▶\t] as soon as you enter it.

Your Body font does need to populate the code point, however.

[FrameMaker-dk]

I'm always confused with this...

▶ U+25B6 Black Right-pointing Triangle
▸ U+25B8 Black Right-pointing Small Triangle

These will work in Arial. But if you switch to Aptos, which is the default font of Word, you will nothing.  I believe Aptos is a unicode font and I would expect it to conform to the standard like Arial. But that does not seem to happen. Why is that?

[Dave Creamer of IDEAS]

Isn't this a different conversation from the OP's?

[Bob_Niland]

Being a Unicode font just means that some code points above \xFF (U+00FF) are populated. Unicode presently defines 154998 codepoints. No font populates all of Unicode, and today, couldn't even if it wanted to, because OpenType has a limit of 65536 per font. FM has a further problem of not being able to render anything above BMP U+FFFF (FRMAKER-10976), but in this case U+25B6 is in the covered BMP space.

The average Unicode font only populates a small fraction of the codespace, and when using anything not on your keyboard, you need to verify that the document font(s) populate each codepoint of interest. Custom enterprise fonts are notoriously stingy. This requires checking MS CharacterMap, BabelMap, or FM CharacterPalette.

When the enterprise style guide specifies a font that doesn't populate some codepoint needed, then the author needs to find a style-matching font that does, and continue to apply a Character Format as needed. My practice is to use an FM variable for all needed non-keyboard characters. This approach works around both the stingy font and BMP problems. For autonumber bullets, the Variable approach is inapplicable. Use \u notation plus the dialog's Character Format.

Why doesn't this seem to be a problem on the web? Because web browsers do ‘font fallback’, quietly substituing missing a glyph from some other font available on the user's system. FM, and most other authoring apps, don't do fallback, will just give you a “?”.

[Lew Yedwab, Resideo]

Hi, everyone:

Thanks for your replies, but with a deadline to meet, I just chickened out and chose another bullet format whose bullet color was already black. Made sure the new format wasn't used anywhere else in the document, changed its font size to match the rest of the content and applied that. I'd like to have time to experiment with the ideas I got back from the post, but time is money and all that. 

Thank you all again!

[Dave Creamer of IDEAS]

Did you change the font size of just the bullet? If you knew how to do that, you should know how to change the bullet color (it's in the same character style panel).