InDesign 2023 eyedropper not dropping a text style in half the text box?

[Zebra Jamie]

So, come with me on this journey. I have two columns of text. Nothing is layered above, nothing is lurking below. I hit "I" to activate the eye dropper and grab the style/color of text from the column on the left. I hover over the text on the right, near the bottom of the column. The tiny "t" activates, indicating it will paste the text formatting. I click and drag to format the text. Success! I do it again a little farther up. So far so good. I reach the 3rd paragraph and the tiny "t" disapears. Now, if I click, it will turn the whole textbox black (the color of the text format I was using). But wait--if I go to the next paragraph up, it starts distributing text formating again.

Does anyone know why the eyedropper has really spotty text recognition?

[Bill Silbert]

Could you upload a screen shot of the file in question? A visual representation would be very helpful in tracking this problem down.

[Zebra Jamie]

I'd be happy to. Know any good ways get get the curser to appear on a screen shot? They seem to disapear when using the "print screen" button or any of the screen-capture apps I have on my computer.(Otherwise I'll just be showing you text boxes and black boxes.) I mean, I guess I could take a video? Might take a while to collect that.

[Zebra Jamie]

Ok, I have a video of the glitch. Let me know if you can tell what's causing the problem.

[Zebra Jamie]

Ok, here is a video of the problem. I using the eyedropper, I grab the star-bullet style from the left and try tro apply it on the right. It works on one paragraph, but not the one above it, unless I drag the eyedropper through the space where it works and into the "dead" space. Any ideas about what's going on?

[Barb Binder]

Hi @Zebra Jamie:

May I entice you to take a little side trip?

How about skipping the Eyedropper tool all together and using styles? You can create a paragraph style that will assign the star bullet, and will nest a character style up through the first colon. Less work, once set up and easy to edit all occurences.

I know you're asking about the Eyedropper and I can tell you that I don't see an immediate reason why it's not working. If it's important for you to stick with the Eyedropper, are you comfortable sharing that one page? You can put it on a file sharing server and post a link to it here which is public or message me directly, which is private.

~Barb

[Zebra Jamie]

Hi Barb,

Ah, I am familiar with styles, and I have to admit, I don't like them. 😛

I've tried using them, but I end up with style-salad after a few months. (I regularly produce 60-75 postcards for my clients every month with new content.)  I'll have 2 styles break each other while competing in the same paragrpah. Or worse, I get styles cross-contaminiating the different brands on accident. Recently, I had one style cross-contaminate about 10 client documents and change something in the basic paragraph formatting which impacted embedding fonts. (Never did figure that one out, and had to recreate a bunch of documents.)

Maybe it's my workflow, or maybe it's the 60+ sets of brand styles I'd have to wrangle in any given month. The eyedropper has always been faster and more reliable. The error doesn't crop up very often, so I guess it's just another thorn in the rose-bush of all Adobe products, but it's annoying as heck and I can never predict when it's going to happen.

[Eugene Tyson]

It does appear to be spotty - by your video - but you get a clear indication when it's ready to use. 

However, Barb is correct - the best solution is to use styles. 

It would be hugely helpful to you to learn more and experiment more with these. 

I've seen first hand 100 styles in documents when only 10 or so were actually required. 

It can be scary but it's worth it.

[Barb Binder]

Hi @Zebra Jamie,

Ok. I had to try! I rely on exclusivly on styles and only use the Eyedropper while teaching InDesign students, so I've never run across this issue. If you've seen it more than once, I'd go aehead and report it as a bug here:
https://indesign.uservoice.com. You can reference this thread.

~Barb

[Zebra Jamie]

I appriciate it. 🙂 I've been resisting using paragraph and character styles, because every time I try, it feels like way more work and time than I want to apply. I always forget what each style looks like for each client, (each of 60+ clients would easily have 20+ active styles in any given month) and I just end up running the gauntlet as I try to find the style that matches what I want it to look like (instead of just making it look like what I want). I wish you could preview styles within the menu-window like you can preview fonts.

I guess I could over-label them ("Headine 1: navy centered 30pt" vs "Headline 2: pumpkin, left aligned, 24pt") but then my window would have to be wide enough to read the titles, which impacts my workspace layout... I promise, I'm not trying to be a difficult student! ^_^*

Just curious, because I am totally self taught with all of this, is there any tips or tricks for making 2 styles work in the same paragrpah? I've noticed that if I have a paragraph set as "body text" but I want the last sentence to be "call to action," it will break the whole paragrpah. One half will be correct, but then the rest turns to black Minion, and it goes back and forth as I try to make the styles work together. I usually give up and abandon styles or just manually change the text to what I want.

[Eugene Tyson]

Pop up an example of what you want visually and we can show how to set it up.