Selected character colour varies at different locations in document

[Michael J B]

I have a paragraph style for body text in my document. The default text is black. I have a character style for use with body text which has the character style set to blue - for use in highlighting text that will need editing at a later date.  The blue is fairly saturated so that it pops out on-screen for quick recognition - see Screen Shot 01.

For some reason, in some locations, the blue shows as much more muted - see Screen Shot 02 (same file, paragraph style and character style). This does not seem related to the monitor - moving the page up/down and right/left on-screen makes no difference.

How do I correct this ?

Thanks in advance.

[Peter Spier]

You haven't shown us the whole page, so this is only a guess, but I'd bet there's some sort of transparency on the page and your transparency blend space is set to CMYK and the blue color is defined as RGB.

[Michael J B]

Hi Peter, I was not aware of transparency blend space. • Yes, transparency blend space is set to CYMK for the document and the colour swatch used for the character style is RGB.

• I checked for transparency but found none as per Screen Shot 03 (where the saturation on screen of the blue is as I wish it to be on document page 5), and Screen Shot 04 (where the same character style swatch colour shows as much more muted on document page 2);

• I checked document page 1 and the blue has the desired saturation there - see Screen Shot 6;

• I then placed the cursor at the start of the paragraph on page 2 beginning with "In Myths to Live By..." (where the blue shows as muted) and pressed the return button until it was moved to page 4 where the blue is now the desired saturation - see Screen Shot 05;

So, in summary:

- on document pages 1, 4, 5 (and the rest of the document pages) the blue used for the "highlighting" character style has the desired saturation;

- the blue only goes muted on pages 2 and 3.

Which means something is different about them but I do not see what.

[Peter Spier]

This has got to be caused by transparency.  Since the problem is on page two, which is half or the two-page spread that includes page 3, and it doesn't seem to be on page 2, it's got to be on page 3 (transparency on either page of a spread affects the whole spread). Transparency includes things like drop shadows and other effects as well as blending modes and, yes, actual transparency set with the slider.

Changing the blend mode to RGB should probably fix the issue.

[Michael J B]

Hi Peter, thanks again.

I ran some further tests and have located the source of the problem, although I do not kow why it causes the problem:

• Screen Shot 07: I checked for effects on page 3 - none;

• Screen Shot 08: there was a graphics box to the left of page 2 - no effects;

• Screen Shot 09: I deleted the graphics box with the map, and the "highlight" colour immediately reverted to the desired saturation;

• Screen Shot 10: I returned the graphics box but deleted the map from it, and saturation was as desired.

What is it about the map image that would cause the saturation shift ?

[Peter Spier]

There's nothing obvious in the screen capture showing the map, but there must be some sort of transparency in it, either in an area cropped off, or an applied effect that you are not seeing, or the map itself is slightly transparent (your transparency dialog is showing settings for the container frame holding the map -- use the diorect select tool to select the map itself and check that).