230 Getting around InDesign limitations

- If you want to become an InDesign power user, you have to learn not just how to use InDesign's features, but also how to get around its limitations. And what to do when InDesign acts strangely. For example, I have a one page document here. It's obviously just black and white text. There's no graphics, there's no other objects in this document. Just one text frame, two columns with a bunch of text in it. So if I open my Swatches panel over here, and I choose from the Swatches panel menu, this item called Select All Unused.

You can see that four swatches are selected: yellow, red, green, and blue. And I can delete those simply by clicking on the trashcan icon. But two colors remain: cyan and magenta. What's that about? It's a mystery and you know how I love to solve mysteries. Cyan, in this case, happens to be used inside of a paragraph style. In fact, it's being used inside all your paragraph styles. Here, let me show you. I'll open the Paragraph Styles panel and I'll right-click, or Control + click with a one-button mouse, on any of these paragraph styles.

Now, I'll choose edit. And inside the paragraph style options dialog box, I'm going to click on Paragraph Shading in this list over on the left. Look at that. There's my cyan. Even though paragraph shading is turned off, InDesign still think that that cyan is being used inside this paragraph style. Paragraph shading first showed up in InDesign CC 2015 and ever since then, Indesign thinks that cyan is always being used in your paragraph styles.

Well, there's an easy way around that. I'll simply cancel that. Go to my Swatches panel. And I'm going to go ahead and drag cyan onto the trashcan icon. InDesign alerts me that this color is being used and asks me what I want to replace it with. I'll just replace this with None and click OK. But that still doesn't answer why magenta is in here. I know that it's not part of any of my paragraph styles. But if I look inside the Character styles panel, I see a clue. There's a character style called "try to delete me".

And so, okay, let's go ahead and try and delete it. I'm going to drag that character style down on top of the trashcan icon and when I let go, yes, there's that alert. It's telling me that this character style is being used somewhere in my document. So I'm going to cancel that. I don't want to mess anything up. Let's go ahead and edit this by right clicking, or Control clicking with a one-button mouse, and seeing what's inside of it. Ah, there it is. There's our character color. It's magenta. So there's a character style being used somewhere in my document that's applying the magenta color.

I'll click Cancel again. And let's go and try and find that character style. I can't see it anywhere, but maybe it's being applied to maybe just one character inside of our document. That might do it. To find it, I'm going to go to the Edit menu and choose Find/Change. Or you could press Command or Control + F. Inside the Find/Change dialog box, I'm going to leave the Find What field empty because I'm not looking for any specific text. I'm looking for any text that has particular formatting applied to it.

Down here, I'll click once in the Find Format field. And inside the Find Format settings dialog box, I'm going to say Search for any text that has the "try to delete me" character style applied to it. I'll click OK, click Find Next, and InDesign cannot find a match. This text is hidden. It's missing. It's nowhere in my document at all. And yet, it still thinks it's being used. That is so frustrating! So I'm going to click OK, then click Done to close the dialog box.

And I need to keep looking for that character style. Well, let's take a look inside the Layers panel. Inside the Layers panel, I can expand that layer and I can see. Nope, there's just that one text frame. Let's take a look at the Links panel, though. The Links panel finally gives us the clue that we need. There's a graphic in there. That graphic, called Fish, is an Illustrator document. It seems to be embedded in the document and it's on page DT. What is page DT? Well, page DT means that this graphic is embedded, or anchored, inside deleted text.

So there is some deleted text somewhere in my document that InDesign is holding onto. Well, the only time that InDesign holds onto deleted text is when the Track Changes feature is turned on. And I talked all about Track Changes in detail in my title, "InDesign Insider Training: Beyond the Essentials". And so I know that you can see deleted text. You can see all the track changes inside Story Editor. All you need to do is place your cursor anywhere in the story, go to the Edit menu, and choose Edit in Story Editor.

There's the story and if I scroll up through the story, I'll suddenly see, there it is. Deleted text. That's the text that InDesign was holding onto. There's a little anchor icon. That must be the graphic I was seeing in the Links panel. And even though I cannot see any character styles inside Story Editor, I suspect that that character style is being used somewhere inside that text. Now I don't need that deleted text any more, so I might as well get rid of it once and for all.

To do that, I'm going to go to the Window menu, choose the Editorial submenu, and then choose Track Changes. Up comes the Track Changes panel and I'm going to click on Accept All Changes In Story. InDesign alerts me and I can say yes, that's okay. And now, that text really is gone. Close Story Editor. And now we can see in the Links panel the graphic is gone inside the Character Styles panel. I can now drag this character style onto the trashcan and it simply deletes, indicating that it really is not being used anywhere.

And inside the Swatches panel, i can delete that Magenta swatch again, simply by dragging it onto the trashcan. No alert, not being used. We have solved all the mysteries in this document. You know, when you encounter something weird in InDesign, there's usually a logical explanation for it. Not always, but usually. I love that Track Changes feature. But this problem where deleted text can still act almost like a ghostly presence in your documents. Well, it's something to watch out for.