Swatches all changed!

[NJ Author]

Hi all,

Got an extremely serious problem happen to me in the middle of editing a massive 150 page document. I have probably 1500-2000 instances of small graphics that require spot Pantone colours. I imported the colors from Illustrator just fine, and spent all night last night applying them to about 300 or 400 selections. The swatch applied a fill with no stroke to the items selected, and all was fine.

About an hour ago I went to continue the process only to find two critical problems.
(1) Selecting a graphic to be worked on, and clicking the swatch strokes it (1pt), not fills it as before.

(2) If I select an existing previously-filled swatch it (a) shows fill as NONE, and (b) strokes it with the Pantone color. I can't figure out how, when or where this went bad. I honestly don't have time to fix hundreds of previously good items. 

Any idea how to fix this so swatches go back to being fills only?

[BobLevine]

I have no idea what happened but my first guess would be something to do with object styles which is what you should have been using all along. And to be perfectly frank, I strongly suspect some kind of user error here.

You'll need to provide a lot more information, including version InDesign, operating system, screenshots and exactly what you did to apply the swatches in the first place if you want any help.

[rob day]

Sounds like you have the Fill/Stroke icon swapped. Here I have it set to Stroke so clicking a swatch would apply a stroke and no fill:

If I click the Fill icon and toggle the Stroke/Fill, clicking a swatch will fill the object:

[BobLevine]

That would be the user error I was thinking but if this was done by hand, I would have thought the OP would have noticed what was or wasn't happening.

That said, this would be fairly simple to fix with a find / change.

[NJ Author]

That was the first thing I tried and it didn't work, unfortunately. Ultimately I restarted the PC (I'm using CS6 on the PC) and opened a previously saved version of the document and it worked again; I re-opened the troubled document and it was fine from then on. Not really sure what happened, but I dodged a bullet for sure.

[BobLevine]

CS6? What operating system?

CS6 is unsupported under Windows 10 and if you think you dodged a bullet this time just wait until everything goes haywire.

[NJ Author]

Yes, under Windows 10/64. I didn't realize it was unsupported. No need for a subscription for the few times I still need to use AI, so until it refuses to run I'll make do, I guess.