Outer Glow Effect will not display correctly

Report · Sep 10, 2020

I have tried several times over the last couple years to apply an outer glow to text, but have issues every time. Some times it will not even show up on the screen or like today, it shows up, but not with the settings I have changed from the default settings.

I have selected the following settings to be applied to text: Normal, Opacity 100%, Precise, 0% Spread & Noise, and size of .12 inch with a teal color in my swatches. What is displayed is something like Opacity 85%, Softer, with a size of .5-1 inch. I have removed the Outer Glow effect and placed it back several times and have copied the text box and pasted it into another indesign document and nothing works.

It's like there are settings stuck in the background and they aren't refreshing when I make these changes.

Report · Sep 10, 2020

Hi Hallie:

Screen shots would help here. I keystroked what you wrote and came up with what you see below. Are you saying that the top values produce the second result? Also what is the blending mode and what color is the background? And the fx appears to the right of the text as per my screen shot?

~Barb

Report · Sep 11, 2020

So after working with it for over an hour yesterday, it somehow changed to look more like what I wanted. So now while I can't give you the exact example from yesterday, I now cannot get it to change from anything but that. I opened up the fx options and it's showing the Precise, Normal, 100%, .05 inch, 0% spread and noise, teal. I just changed it to Softer and 1 inch and nothing changed. I then changed the normal to almost all of the options and nothing changed here after hitting OK. I also resized the text box and the outer glow stayed in the original position and it didn't move with text.

Here's what it looked like first thing this morning:

Here's what it looked like after I changed a bunch of the settings and resized the width of the text box:

Report · Sep 11, 2020

Is it a refresh issue? Are you on a Mac? What version of InDesign and OS?

~Barb

Report · Sep 11, 2020

Yeah, it's a refresh issue because I closed them out earlier to run my Creative Cloud updates for my apps and when I opened the document back up, the outer glow actually reflected the settings. I did just double check it to see if the problem persists even though I ran the updates, but it's still a problem. It's like the settings get stuck and don't update. I noticed the opacity does change, but that's it. Nothing else. I've had a similar problem before where the outer glow didn't show up at all until I exported it as a pdf. And I noticed this morning that the thumbnail in the Page window shows the correct settings applied, but just not on the main page.

Report · Sep 11, 2020

Oh, and I'm not on a mac. I've got a Dell that is supposedly a gaming computer so it should have the appropriate speed, processing, and graphics cards needed. But maybe it's a problem with the processor or graphics card and not the program itself.