Solution: Rulers, Palettes, Fonts List Blank in InDesign or InCopy

One day you may find that text, but­tons, and even the title bars of InDesign and/or InCopy palettes are bare­ly read­able or com­plete­ly invis­i­ble. Deleting the IND/INC pref­er­ences will have no effect on the problem.

The issue–and this solution–is only for Windows users.

The prob­lem only occurs when you have cus­tomized your Windows graph­i­cal user inter­face col­ors beyond what is avail­able in the native Windows Display Properties dia­log. Although such cus­tomiza­tion is native to recent betas and the upcom­ing Windows Vista oper­at­ing sys­tem, they are avail­able today by edit­ing the reg­istry or by using OS tweak­ing util­i­ties or appli­ca­tion skin­ning tools like Stardock’s WindowBlinds.

The per­cent­age of InDesign/InCopy users who might expe­ri­ence this issue today is extra­or­di­nar­i­ly low, but I’m notic­ing a sharp increase over the last sev­er­al months. More to the point, between the impend­ing release of Windows Vista and the grow­ing pop­u­lar­i­ty of cor­po­rate desk­top brand­ing through custom-designed skins, the fre­quen­cy of this issue is like­ly to con­tin­ue to rise, and sharply.

Most mod­ern films and tele­vi­sion shows with an empha­sis on tech­nol­o­gy or sci­ence fic­tion (for exampe: “C.S.I.”, “C.S.I.:Miami”, “Battlestar: Galactica”) employ skin­ning appli­ca­tions run­ning atop Windows to make their on-screen com­put­ers look more unique and high-tech. Even com­put­er and com­po­nent man­u­fac­tur­ers are begin­ning to use user interface-altering skins to brand and enliv­en their prod­ucts. AlienWare Computers ship new sys­tems to cus­tomers with cus­tom designed skins pre-activated and NVidia, the mak­er of pre­mière game and video pro­duc­tion video cards, also ships a skin­ning run­time with their prod­ucts com­plete with an NVidia brand­ed, system-wide user inter­face skin. Even non-technology com­pa­nies like butane lighter mak­er Zippo are tak­ing a cue from the enter­tain­ment and tech­nol­o­gy indus­tries by com­mis­sion­ing and dis­trib­ut­ing brand­ed skins.

As of the date of this writ­ing, both Adobe’s and Stardock’s tech­ni­cal sup­port depart­ments report igno­rance of this issue, and nei­ther has a solu­tion ready. Here is what they don’t know–in good old TSPAM for­mat to make the sup­port tech­ni­cians’ jobs easier:

Issue:

Textual and graph­i­cal ele­ments of the InDesign and/or InCopy user inter­face appear to dis­ap­pear or become too light to read, par­tic­u­lar­ly with regard to menus and palettes.

Users typ­i­cal­ly describe the issue as:
“Can’t read font pre­views in fonts list.”
“Palettes are com­plete­ly blank.”
“Rulers are blank.”
“Can’t read [some­thing] on palette [some­thing].”

Analysis:

Severity: High, ren­ders InDesign/InCopy unus­able to affect­ed users
Adobe Application: InDesign and InCopy, ver­sions 2, CS, CS2
Operating System: Windows Vista, XP, 2000, 98, 95
Root cause: InDesign/InCopy defect

This issue affects rulers, palette titles and tabs, cap­tions, but­tons, list items (e.g. lay­ers on the Layers palette) and drop­down menus (e.g. the stroke type menu appears blank on the Stroke palette), and also effects some menu item sub-menus such as the pre­view text in the Type > Fonts menu.

Figure 1 shows the issue in action on the Stroke palette. Notice how the inac­tive Text Wrap palette tab reveals that the text and UI ele­ments aren’t tru­ly invisible–they’re mere­ly ren­dered in a col­or iden­ti­cal or near­ly iden­ti­cal to the palette back­ground color.

The issue is direct­ly caused by the fact that InDesign and InCopy incor­rect­ly col­or UI ele­ments with the RGB val­ue ref­er­enced from the “WindowFrame” system-wide col­or attribute stored in the Windows reg­istry at HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Colors\WindowFrame. Other Adobe appli­ca­tions like Photoshop, Illustrator, Acrobat, and so forth, as well as oth­er third-party appli­ca­tions, do not exhib­it the prob­lem because they adhere to the cor­rect Microsoft user inter­face spec­i­fi­ca­tions and use the glob­al sys­tem “MenuText” val­ue to col­or their UI fore­ground elements.

The typ­i­cal Windows user is unable to change the “WindowFrame” col­or as Microsoft did not build direct access to it into the Windows UI. By default, the RGB col­or of “WindowFrame” is in high con­trast to the back­ground col­or of dialogs and menus, which draw from the “ButtonFace,” “Menu,” “MenuFace,” and relat­ed col­or val­ues in the reg­istry. Thus, for the typ­i­cal Windows user today, InDesign’s reliance on the “WindowFrame” col­or is not gen­er­al­ly exposed as a defect. However, through third-party UI tweak­ing and skin­ning appli­ca­tions, and via the skin­ning sys­tem built into Windows Vista, users can and often do alter the “WindowFrame” col­or, which can result in an extreme­ly low or nonex­is­tant con­trast between UI fore­ground and back­ground col­ors. In the case of Windows Vista themes and users of third-party skin­ning applications–a ris­ing per­cent­age in cor­po­rate environments–most often the “WindowFrame” col­or is changed from its default by the theme or skin, and usu­al­ly with­out the user under­stand­ing what is actu­al­ly tak­ing place in her Windows registry.

Solution:

Ultimately, the solu­tion is to repair the defect in InDesign and draw UI col­ors from the pre­scribed reg­istry val­ues. Barring a patch to effect the solu­tion, the workaround is to man­u­al­ly edit the reg­istry to restore col­or con­trast between “WindowFrame” and the col­ors stored in afore­men­tioned reg­istry keys.

  1. Close InDesign, InCopy, and all oth­er Windows applications.
  2. Open the Windows Registry by going to Start Menu > Run, and, in the Run dia­log, exe­cut­ing “reged­it” with­out the quo­ta­tion marks.
  3. Once in the reg­istry, nav­i­gate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Colors.
  4. In the right pane, locate the “WindowFrame” string toward the bot­tom of the list. Double-click “WindowFrame” to open the Edit String dialog.
  5. In the Value Data field of the Edit String dia­log is a stan­dard RGB triplet col­or, with space-separated val­ues. Change this to a col­or that con­trasts with the val­ues for “ButtonFace,” “Menu,” and “MenuBar,” which should all be iden­ti­cal or sim­i­lar. If, for exam­ple, the user is expe­ri­enc­ing an effect sim­i­lar to the one shown above in Figure 1, where light text is ren­dered on a light back­ground, change the “WindowFrame” Value Data to a dark RGB triplet such as “0 0 0”–black–or “41 41 41”–a dark grey. If the user has the oppo­site effect, her palette back­grounds are dark and dark type blends into it, set “WindowFrame” Value Data to a light RGB col­or such as white–“255 255 255”.
  6. Once Value Data is changed, click OK and exit the reg­istry. Restart Windows and launch InDesign to con­firm the change.

This will resolve the issue in the short term. Every time the user changes skins or themes, or edits the sys­tem UI col­ors via a tweak­ing applet, the issue may reoc­cur. The user will then need to run through the same steps to resolve it.

Note: On multi-user sys­tems that employ skin­ning for all users, make the same change to each user pro­file as well as to HKEY_USERS\.DEFAULT\Control Panel\Colors to ensure that new­ly accounts will not expe­ri­ence the issue (with the cur­rent col­or scheme, them, or skin).

More Information

Within the past two years I have con­tact­ed both Adobe Technical Support regard­ing this issue as well as Stardock, the mak­er of the most pop­u­lar Windows skin­ning appli­ca­tion and tech­nol­o­gy, WindowBlinds, and the com­pa­ny respon­si­ble for much of Windows Vistas skin­ning tech­nol­o­gy. My con­tact includ­ed pro­vid­ing the above gen­er­al solu­tion, and, to Stardock, a solu­tion using their skin cre­ation soft­ware, SkinStudio.

If you are a WindowBlinds user and would like a way to resolve the issue with­out direct­ly edit­ing the reg­istry, or if you are a WindowBlinds skin cre­ator inter­est­ed in help­ing users of his cre­ations, please see my SkinStudio solu­tion on WinCustomize​.com here.