An Adobe engineer has revealed that, unknown to almost all of us, InDesign CS and CS2 have a hidden capability to add a color swatch while editing styles. Imagine this: You’re in the Paragraph Styles palette defining a new paragraph style for a subhead in your publication, and you’d like to color the text a Pantone color.
But wait! As you can see in the illustration, you haven’t created or imported the swatch color you need for that color. That means cancelling out of your dialog, going to the Swatches palette and defining or importing the Pantone color there, then returning to the Paragraph Styles palette, right?
No, all you have to do is double-click on the fill or stroke proxy to the left of the color list, and it reveals the New Color Swatch dialog box!
Just pick Pantone Solid Coated from the Color Mode list, select your color, click Add, and then Done, and you’re back in the Paragraph Styles dialog. The new color has now been added to your color swatches, and you can select it from the Character Color list.
I found that this undocumented feature works in the Paragraph Styles and Character Styles palettes. In the Object Styles palette, I couldn’t get it to work to define a Fill or Stroke, but, strangely, I could pick a Drop Shadow color. It would be nice to see this added to other parts of the InDesign interface. And also documented so someone other than an engineer could find it!
This article was last modified on December 18, 2021
This article was first published on February 13, 2007
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