Yet Another Question About Black Settings

[Todd123]

This is going to betray my ignorance, but I for the life of me am unable to figure out how to set the color settings in Affinity to simple black rather than rich black. Everything I've read online seems to be missing several steps in the middle. Can anyone provide advice?

I know how to set the color to simple black: click on a swatch, go to CMYK slider, and move C,M, and Y to 0 and k to 100. But I can't for the life of me figure out how to apply it to the whole document. I go to the color select box in the top right corner, click on black, move the sliders to where they need to be, but when I go to highlight the text I want it's set back to rich black. It doesn't seem like there's a way to set the color of font via text styles, either.

I'm using Affinity Publisher, v. 1

[Old Bruce]

What I do is make a document which has a colour format of CMYK and then I will also make a Document Palette that has a defined black colour as a Global Colour, I will name it as Text Black. The values would be (CMYK) 0 0 0 100. If I do this in an RGB document then the Text Black will be converted to RGB colours because that is the documents colour format.

[Todd123]

28 minutes ago, Old Bruce said:

What I do is make a document which has a colour format of CMYK and then I will also make a Document Palette that has a defined black colour as a Global Colour, I will name it as Text Black. The values would be (CMYK) 0 0 0 100. If I do this in an RGB document then the Text Black will be converted to RGB colours because that is the documents colour format.

How do I do the bolded? That's what I've been having trouble with; all the instructions are just, "make a document palette," etc., but the problem is I don't know how to do that.

[Old Bruce]

17 minutes ago, Todd123 said:

How do I do the bolded? That's what I've been having trouble with; all the instructions are just, "make a document palette," etc., but the problem is I don't know how to do that.

The three line icon (aka Hamburger menu) on the Swatches palette will help you out for a lot of things. First choose the Document Palette, then set the colour in the Colours Palette, and then make a new Global Colour.

There are other options available from the Hamburger menu. I like to set the apperance of the Swatches panel to view as a list so I can see the names of the colours.

[Todd123]

Ah, this is extremely helpful. I'll give it a shot when I get home. Does this have to be done before a document is created, or can it be retroactively applied to an existing doc?

[Old Bruce]

6 minutes ago, Todd123 said:

... Does this have to be done before a document is created, or can it be retroactively applied to an existing doc?

It can be done at any time. I try and get into the habit of setting the proper colour format at the time of document creation. Another thing to consider is that it is easier to make a Global Colour at the beginning of the work and assign it to the various objects as you make them as opposed to going back and having to find all the objects that you have already made and assigning the Global Colour hundreds of times.

[Todd123]

11 minutes ago, Old Bruce said:

It can be done at any time. I try and get into the habit of setting the proper colour format at the time of document creation. Another thing to consider is that it is easier to make a Global Colour at the beginning of the work and assign it to the various objects as you make them as opposed to going back and having to find all the objects that you have already made and assigning the Global Colour hundreds of times.

Hindsight and all that. I appreciate the help, and will follow up if I've got any more questions.

[Todd123]

Okay, so I've done the above; created a document palette with a black that is set at 0, 0, 0, 100, and added that as a global color. How do I apply that to a text style? One thing that confuses me is that I'm not sure how to set the color of a text style to a default. For instance, when I create a text style I can go to "Edit x", and the only option I see that is applicable is "color and decorations", and those have an options of "text fill" and "highlight", but in the default are both unchecked, without a color.

[Old Bruce]

15 hours ago, Todd123 said:

For instance, when I create a text style I can go to "Edit x", and the only option I see that is applicable is "color and decorations", and those have an options of "text fill" and "highlight", but in the default are both unchecked, without a color.

Click on the little colour area.