Formatting multiple text objects at once

[OneCruelBagel]

Hi there!

I'm putting a document together that consists of a large number of photos with text over the top of them (it's a calendar), and I want to be able to set the text colour to ensure it's visible over the photo - for example, a snowy shot would have lots of black text, but if there's a dark tree in one area, the text there might need to be white.

I've got all the text objects placed and ready, but they're all in black as that was the default I was working with when I set it up, so now I'm going through and fixing it. Annoyingly, if I select more than one text object, the text properties window greys out and won't let me change anything. How can I make this behave, or at least work around it?

I know the "correct" way to do this is to use text styles, so you're only changing the style in one place and all the text objects get updated automatically. If I can create a white and a black text style and then select multiple text objects and apply a style to them all at once, that would be just as good, however as far as I can tell, you use the same broken text properties dialogue to apply styles as to set the colour directly, so this doesn't help.

How can I change the properties of multiple text objects at once? Styles are not (as far as I can tell) appropriate here.

Thank you!

[RodneyLee]

I would do a translucent banner of some kind to go behind the text and on top of pic's so you can just use one color font/ or any color font, (set for the month or season)

[OneCruelBagel]

I've done that occasionally when the photo is so busy that neither colour shows up legibly, but it's not a fix for what I'm trying to do. Thanks for the suggestion though.

It used to be better than this - last year when I was making calendars, the then version worked as long as you only had text objects selected (so I could select all the ones on a single page fairly easily, then change them at once). It has actually got worse since then, now simply having 2 text objects selected prevents you from changing the text colour.