How To Add A Drop Shadow To Text In Indesign

How to Become Text Drop Shadows to Update in InDesign

InDesign suffers from an assortment of visual glitches like disappearing text, objects not appearing where they really are on the page, etc. Most of these are limited to specific combinations of hardware and operating system. But one visual bug that affects users on all platforms is how a drop shadow applied to text will not update when the text is edited.

And so, if you take something like this:

InDesign text drop shadow problem before editing

And delete the 2d line of text, the shadow remains.

InDesign text drop shadow problem after editing

Forcing the screen to redraw, moving or resizing the text frame, etc will not reliably update the shadow. Fortunately, this glitch is merely a screen antiquity; if you export a PDF the shadow will be correct. Still, it'southward very aggravating, especially since this bug has been described on the InDesign UserVoice site for years, but at that place's no indication that an official gear up is in the works. So, for at present (and, apparently, afterwards), here are some things that you can do to force the shadow to update.

Cut and Paste in Identify

Select the text frame with the Selection tool, the cut the frame and choose Edit > Paste in Place. This is not ideal, since it can modify the stacking lodge of objects in your layout, and information technology's a pain when the text frame is grouped with other stuff. But it seems to always piece of work.

Toggle Proof Colors

Turn View > Proof Colors on and off. This is my preferred method. It doesn't touch on anything in your layout and you can assign information technology a custom keyboard shortcut and then y'all tin do it instantly.

assigning a custom keyboard shortcut to View Proof Colors in InDesign

The fact that the problem doesn't appear in output fabricated me call up of this 1. I besides thought that turning Overprint Preview on and off would do the same matter. Alas, information technology doesn't.

If you accept found any other ways to brand text drop shadows update 100% of the time, please share them in the comments and I'll add them to this postal service.

Shout out to Michael Brady, who inspired this post by sharing the trouble in the InDesign Secrets Facebook Group.