Bulk reformat font weight and colour in indesign

Question

Ive added text boxes to each page of an indesign document. The text content is all correct, but now i want to bulk change the weight of the font and the colour of the text.

Can this be done or would i need to go to each page highlight the text box and change each one manually ?

All the text boxes will be changes to the same font weight and colour, there are none that i want to keep in another style / colour.

Answer 1

That can be done fairly easily using Find/Change. Adobe built in some little known, but VERY powerful features.

There's this tutorial from adobe, it's a bit wordy: https://helpx.adobe.com/indesign/using/find-change.html But it explains all the different features available in find/change.

This one is a bit more of a "quick read" without as much detail and relating to color instead of font, but it gives you the idea of what you can do. https://designerhelp.wordpress.com/tag/indesign-change-color/

Let me know if you need a more step-by-step for specifically what you want to do.

Answer 2

This sounds like you did not set up any paragraph styles, which would mean every text in your document has the default paragraph style "[Basic Paragraph]". To change the typeface of all texts in this document you only need to change the font of this [Basic Paragraph] style.

Open the Paragraph Style panel, double click [Basic Paragraph], go to the section "Basic Character Formats", set your desired font, change its color, then click OK. Done.

Answer 3

To answer you question I had to break the answer to 3 Parts:

Part #1: How to bulk change Font / Font Weight:

1. Open Menu Type > Find Font >

This will open a dialogue box with all your used fonts listed.

2. Then you can change all your fonts Or font weights assuming you're using multiple fonts and you want them all changed By Clicking on each font then choose your final font from Replace With: Panel.

This Dialogue Box also gives you control on missing fonts in any document in case you have any. But unfortunately this dialogue cannot control text color.

Part #2: How to bulk change text color?

I Couldn't think of any tool I can use other than using scripting.

1. Open Menu Window > Utilities > Scripts Or Press Ctrl+Alt+F11 to open the scripts panel menu.

2. Right Click on "User" > Reveal in explorer.

3. In the opened location Create new JavaScript document and name it as you want, then Save it.

4. Paste the following script to the newly created JaveScript document...

   main();
   function main(){
       var myDocument = app.documents.item(0);
       var myTextFrames = myDocument.textFrames;
       //Create a color.
       try{
           myColorA = myDocument.colors.item("Yellow"); #Change the name of the color as you want
           //If the color does not exist, trying to get its name will generate an error.
           myName = myColorA.name;
       }
       catch (myError){
           //The color style did not exist, so create it.
           myColorA = myDocument.colors.add({name:"Yellow", model:ColorModel.process, colorValue:[0, 0, 100, 0]}); #Change the name of the color as you want and change the combination
       }
       //The following for loop will fail to format all of the paragraphs.
       for(var i = 0; i < myTextFrames.length; i++){
   
           var myText = myTextFrames.item(i);
           var myTextInside = myText.parentStory.paragraphs;
           for(var j = 0; j < myTextInside.length; j++){
               myTextInside.item(j).fillColor = myColorA;
           }
       }
   }
   

5. Change the name of the color as you want and change the combination, Then Save it

I've indicated the places you should change in the code by "#" mark.

6. Return to inDesign, You should see the newly created script name in the menu.

7. Right Click on the Script > Run script

the script should run and change color of all of your text in the document your selected color.

Part #3: How to bulk change font size?

You didn't mention it, But I assumed that you may want to do it also, Who knows?

1. Add the following line to the previous code

   myTextInside.item(j).pointSize = 9; #choose you selected font size
   

Right after myTextInside.item(j).fillColor = myColorA;. And inside the closing curly bracket }.

2. Save the script.
3. Right click on the script name > Run script and the script will change all text to selected font size.

Actually this script can be modified for further customization. Scripting for inDesign or any Adobe software is incredibly powerful and can make almost every thing automatically. You may refer to this link for more Adobe inDesign Scripting official documentation.

Next time try using Paragraph and Character Styles it's very powerful feature and gives you a lot of controls for text and fonts.

Answer 4

Make a GREP search to change all the document characters

• Open the Find/Change panel, Cmd + F Mac or Ctrl + F Win
• Click the GREP tab
• Type . at the Find What field, the dot means all the characters
• Choose Document at the Search dropdown menu
• Click the Change Format Icon and choose the new character settings
• Click the Change All button