InDesign already allows Paragraph Rules to use Text Color as their color source. I would like the same option to be available for Paragraph Borders and Paragraph Shading.

At the moment, Paragraph Borders and Shading can only use a fixed swatch. This creates unnecessary manual work whenever the text color of individual paragraphs needs to vary while the same paragraph style is retained.

For example, I am currently working on a publication in which many subheadings share the same typography, spacing, and border treatment, but the client wants different colors for different subheadings.

Ideally, I should be able to use one paragraph style and simply change the text color of each subheading. The border should then automatically inherit that text color.

Instead, I currently have to either:

• manually change both the text color and the paragraph border color every time, or
• create multiple nearly identical paragraph styles solely for different colors.

Neither approach is efficient, and the second one unnecessarily complicates the style structure of the document.

This becomes especially problematic in long documents or client-driven projects where colors may change frequently during revisions.

A [Text Color] option in the Paragraph Border and Paragraph Shading color menus would solve this elegantly.

The desired behavior could simply follow the existing logic already used by Paragraph Rules. In other words, this is not necessarily a new color-management concept for InDesign—it would be an extension of functionality that already exists elsewhere in the application.

There was already a similar request posted several years ago, but this workflow limitation still exists in current versions of InDesign. I believe it is worth reconsidering because it would make paragraph styles substantially more flexible, especially for publications that use repeated structural styles with variable colors.

Suggested implementation:

Paragraph Style → Paragraph Border → Color → [Text Color]

and

Paragraph Style → Paragraph Shading → Color → [Text Color]

This would allow designers to maintain a clean, reusable paragraph-style system without having to duplicate styles or manually synchronize decorative colors with text colors.