Can a paragraph style in InDesign be highlighted in color?

[dublove]

There are some commonly used styles that I would like to highlight in a different color to make them easier to find quickly.

I was referring to highlighting a particular style when many styles are in the paragraph styles panel.
I've searched and I don't think there is a setting for this.

[Willi Adelberger]

Underline, paragraph shadow and several other properties. 

[Manan Joshi]

As mentioned paragraph border and shading may help you. With respect to scripting, there are properties to set these up. See

https://www.indesignjs.de/extendscriptAPI/indesign-latest/#ParagraphStyle_2.html

-Manan

[dublove]

Hi~

Manan Joshi

Willi Adelberger

I may not have expressed myself clearly, I've reworked my original post.
I was referring to highlighting a particular style when many styles are in the paragraph styles panel.

[dublove]

Seems like photoshop would work.
One can only hope it's official.

[Manan Joshi]

You have already tried and not found any way to do it. I have also not seen anything like that happening on the native panels so yeah most probably it is not possible.

-Manan

[Manan Joshi]

If this is about highlighting on the Paragraph Style panel then I don't think so it is possible. In fact not much can be done on the panel via scripting

-Manan

[m1b]

Hi and sorry @dublove—this is funny!—I actually was very interested in your original post, to see whether it was possible to highlight different text styles becaues I believed that would be very useful to find cases where styles have gone astray or wrong styles are applied.

So I wrote a script to do and I've published it to my github repository.

When I was testing it, I used a copy of a real and complex document with many styles and even in my limited playing with it I found it somewhat revelatory—I thought my document was very clean but there were a few messy bits here and there. I will find this useful.

If anyone is interested, feel free to read more about it in my repo! Or you can download directly if you don't like reading. Let me know if it's useful to anyone.

- Mark

P.S. Sorry dublove I answered a different question. Was fun for me!

[dublove]

I'll read it sometime, maybe you worked a miracle or maybe you lost your way forward.

[Fred.L]

Hey @m1b 

Very interesting script! Thanks for sharing.

I'm sure you are aware of @Marc Autret  Stylighter script (https://www.indiscripts.com/post/2013/11/stylighter-1-4-for-indesign-cs4-cs5-cs6-cc) back in 2013 (ages ago in terms of scripting) which I'm kind of still using everyday. I haven't found any explanation that may help me understand the differences between yours and M.Autret's, and since the Stylighter script is obfuscated, I can't even compare the codes.

Could you help understand more about it?

Thanks

[m1b]

@Fred.L Woah, I've actually never seen that script before! Also I don't tend to go looking at other scripts because I like writing them myself. But yeah, my script seems *extremely* similar to Marc's.

It's funny because the whole idea came to me because of the question asked by the OP here on this thread. The original question was how to highlight styles, and I thought that would be actually really handy. But then OP clarified the question so my answer was sort of pointless here! Haha.

As to your question @Fred.L I don't know what the differences between our two scripts are... the concepts involved are simple so both our scripts probably converge to a large degree. I would guess that Marc's script is considerably more sophisticated than my quick one.

***

Okay I downloaded Marc's script and ran it, and it seems to use a totally different mechanism than mine—and honestly I'm not sure at first glance how it works. Mine creates temporary "highlighter" conditions (see the Type & Tables > Conditional Text panel), but Marc's doesn't seem to work that way, or if it does, it creates them invisibly. Marc is a bit of a wizard, so nothing would surprise me.

Let me know if you have any specific questions about my script. Also have a read of the comments in the code—I put some explanation along the way.

- Mark

[Fred.L]

Hey @m1b 
Thanks for the quick reply,

the concepts involved are simple so both our scripts probably converge to a large degree. I would guess that Marc's script is considerably more sophisticated than my quick one.

---

I figured that much. Marc "the wizard" Autret explained having used a forgotten ID property that was meant to be used on a larger scale but proved to be unreliable in the end. As a matter of fact, the colors used are actually not consistent throughout the document . For some reasons, there is a slight shift along the pages. Not an overly big issue if you ask me, but I guess since it's not a "perfect" consistency, it was left aside.

Anyway,

I haven't deeply tested your solution yet, but using conditional text seems a simpler way to go about it. For the records, it actually was the solution  suggested to Roland Dreger for his Grep Highlighter (www.rolanddreger.net/de/249/highlight-grep-in-indesign/). Definitely a solid solution as far as I know. Great thinking then. 

Allow me some feedback please:

Positive points :

• Good versatility. Using conditional texts is great. Allow user to show/ hide colors without running the script again, but via the Conditional text panel (great). 
• Better compatibility with show/ hide manual overides than with Marc’s StyleLighter script where the colors are dealt simultaneously. A paragraph with manual overides will stay in the usual blue despite any color put on it. With your script, the blue color will be on top of conditional text, but if we hide Manual overides, the color applied will show. Good added value here!
• Seems to not be too impactful on computer performances for I've tried (I'm on Mac).
• Stable. Consistency in the colors. Fantastic!

Possible Improvements :

• I would definitely go for a palette, not a dialog box.
• Users need to check the names of the styles they want to adjust.
• We need to be able to apply colors on several styles on a single run of the script. At the moment, the script closes once 1 color is applied. We need to run it again for the next style.
• I would add the possibility to use the document swatches for the colors. I believe it would be very convenient to be able to map a color palette that would make sense for users’ workflow. It is relevant to me anyway, but I agree not to have the monopoly on the truth ^^

[m1b]

Hi @Fred.L I was pleased with the way using conditional texts interacted with the document—even existing conditional texts. And it's easy to walk back: just delete the highlighter conditions.

Those are great ideas for improvements. I'll put those on my todo list for that script.

- Mark

[Fred.L]

Hey @dublove 

Your request is legit. I wish it would be already available. This feature has been asked in 2018 and hasn't been prioritized yet. 
https://indesign.uservoice.com/forums/601021-adobe-indesign-feature-requests/suggestions/33490237-ab...

As an alternative to using colors, what I do is :

- Never use folders (little time saving, allow duplicate style names, cumbersome when using in conjunctions with scripts)

- Always use a common structure rule (preffixes, structure naming, suffixes etc.). 

- Extensive use of shortcuts and a mapping adjusted to your use (ie, on a Mac, Shift +Num for ParaStyles Titles, Alt + Num for other ParaStyles , Alt + Shift + Num for CharStyles etc.). On a Mac, with the 3 "Cmd / Shift /Alt" keys, you can map up to 70 shortcuts. After a while, using the same shortcuts just become natural and speed up your workflow.

- Use a stream deck (elagato 24 is perfect) to organize the use of less common styles

Just to give you some thinking