How to Define a default stroke in InDesign

If I create a NEW document it works correctly, but on existing documents it does not work.

Hi @PeterD-NJ , I don’t think there is a corruption—as James noted, the page item default preference is both an application and document level preference—most InDesign preferences work that way.

So you set the application’s behavior by setting the stroke with no documents open, but all existing documents can have their own default behavior, which is why your existing documents are not responding to the application default you set with no docs open.

The page item defaults are scriptable. This script would change the application default and the defaults for any open documents:

var p = {strokeWeight: .25, strokeColor:"Black", fillColor:"None"}
app.pageItemDefaults.properties = p
var d = app.documents;
if (d.length > 0) {
    for (var i = 0; i < d.length; i++){
        d[i].pageItemDefaults.properties = p;
    };   
} 

If you really want it to be the same for every document you open, a startup script could listen for an open event and change the defaults for every document you open. I can post that code if you are interested.