How to remove auto-stroke from text

[Stephanie24393672mbnb]

Hello~ My workplace has translated all our old Quark files to ID (yay!) and, you know, we have issues related to the translating, but one of the most persistent is the way ID adds a stroke to text. I might have a theory about how/when this happens, but the important thing is that we never want a stroke on our text, ever. Like, never. We're currently having to reprint documents several times because, oh, there's the stroke again. So, is there any way to just turn that function OFF? Thanks so much!

[John Mensinger]

Well, at first you seem to acknowledge it's a conversion issue. And if you have a theory about how it happens, perhaps there is something in that you can use, but without knowing anything about the nature of the original Quark files and whether paragraph or character styles are coming through the conversion, it would be tough to guess. Of course, InDesign never adds a stroke to text on its own, and there isn't a never-stroke-text setting anywhere to enable, so I suspect you're kind of stuck checking for it on a file-by-file basis. Someone here may be able to help ease the burden with a scripting solution.

[Stephanie24393672mbnb]

My "theory" isn't brilliant or even useful, just that there's a glitch in the conversion and ID thinks all the text has a stroke, for some reason, so every time we backspace into the *old* formatting, ID applies a stroke to the whole paragraph. I was hoping against hope that we could make it stop somehow, but I guess not. Thanks for your reply!

[Joel Cherney · Accepted solution]

My "theory" isn't brilliant or even useful, just that there's a glitch in the conversion and ID thinks all the text has a stroke, for some reason, so every time we backspace into the *old* formatting, ID applies a stroke to the whole paragraph.

It's been a looong time since I have worked in an INDD file that started its life in QXP, but I am totally convinced that your theory is correct. It is, in fact, an artifact of the conversion process, where Q2ID tries to simulate something in Quark by adding stroke in InDesign. (I don't recall if InDesign's native ability to import old Quark docs caused the same conversion error.) 

So, to "get it to stop somehow" is going to require more than one step. If you have lots of files to process  (and it sounds like you do) then it would most likely be worth it to wrap these steps up into a single script, and to run that script each time you open up a converted file.

1) Turn off all strokes on all text throughout the document. 

2) Turn off all strokes in all paragraph and character styles

These are basically the steps outlined by Rene below. I have written this little script to turn off all strokes in all paragraph and character styles, as it has been my project this last year to Get Fast At Javascript, and The Jedi has already posted in this thread. So: here's my little script to turn all stroke weights to zero in all paragraph and character styles. 

var myDoc = app.activeDocument;
ParaStyle_Remove_Stroke();
CharStyle_Remove_Stroke();

function ParaStyle_Remove_Stroke(){
	var countAllParagraphStyles = myDoc.allParagraphStyles.length;	
	for(var a=2;a<myDoc.allParagraphStyles.length;a++){	
		try{
			myDoc.allParagraphStyles[a].strokeWeight = 0;
		}catch(e){}
	}
}

function CharStyle_Remove_Stroke(){
	var countAllCharacterStyles = myDoc.allCharacterStyles.length;	
	for(var a=1;a<myDoc.allCharacterStyles.length;a++){	
		try{
			myDoc.allCharacterStyles[a].strokeWeight = 0;
		}catch(e){}
	}
}

[Stephanie24393672mbnb]

Ooh, thank you so much! Unfortunately, our IT department says "we don't know anything about InDesign" and pretty much refused to look into the possibilities of scripts. Can you recommend a way for me to learn how to use scripts? I'm clueless but eager to learn.

[FRIdNGE]

What is "auto-stroke"?

Sample screenshot!

(^/)  The Jedi

[Stephanie24393672mbnb]

I simply mean ID automatically adding a stroke to the text. It's not easy to see until we print, so I don't think a screenshot will help matters. At this point, I suspect it's a conversion glitch and we'll just be dealing with it forever.

[Rene Andritsch]

Do your texts have Paragraph and Characters Styles applied throughout? Then it would only be a matter of adjusting the Style Options.

Otherwise you could run a “Find/Change” on the stroked text.

[Stephanie24393672mbnb]

Thanks, yes, I fixed up all the styles to have no stroke. This thing is an artifact from Quark, I'm sure.

[Rene Andritsch]

Have you also tried to save your files as an idml file after conversion, reopen them and save as new files?

[Stephanie24393672mbnb]

Yep, did that.

[Rene Andritsch]

You probably used a tool for the conversion. If so, did you contact the developer about the issue?