Clear the Color in a Character Style Back to Ignore
What do you do when you want to remove the color from a character style definition? It's easy to do, once you know the trick.
Did you ever accidentally include a color when you created a character style, so you need to go back to
(“Ignore”), but you don’t want to recreate/reapply the character style? It’s easy to do, but the method is a bit obscure.
Here’s the trick: In the Character Styles panel, right-click on the style and choose Edit. In the Character Color settings, the swatch applied by the style will be highlighted. Command/Ctrl-click on the swatch. That’s it!
Before:

After:

This works because Command/Ctrl-clicking adds or removes something from a list in InDesign. If you have a list of 10 paragraph styles, you can Command/Ctrl-click on three of them (they don’t have to be next to each other), then deselect one by Command/Ctrl-clicking on it.
So in this case, you can Command/Ctrl-click on the color to deselect it from the list, leaving you with nothing in the list, which = “Ignore.”
This article was last modified on April 11, 2023
This article was first published on March 4, 2009
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