What's your favourite shortcut?

[eugenetyson]

Ok so we may or may not have our own shortcuts set up. Some of us may be using Quarks short cuts and some of us are using InDesign Shortcuts. You can edit the shortcuts by selecting Edit>Keyboard Shortcuts from the menu bar. From here you can choose which set of shortcuts, Default, Quark or Pagemaker.

Well I learnt design in Quark so I'm used to those shortcuts so I kept them and selected this option.

Then I had a look through the options and you can find great options and assign your own shortcuts. For example, I put in for me that CTRL+ALT+SHIFT+"+" would give me Title Case, and CTRL+ALT+SHIFT+"-" would give me Sentence. And so on. As these are options you can't set in the paragraph styles. So it was a handy work around and I didn't have to change 300 chapters of paragraph headings by mindlessly going to the menu bar and back to the text 3 million times.

Nonetheless, shortcuts are important, we all use them, to cut/copy and paste, place images/text/pdf's etc. It doesn't really matter what key you press to make a shortcut happen. It's just handy that we all know we can achieve a very handy thing by pressing a key and not having to drag the mouse all the way up to the menu bar.

My favourite shortcut this week is:

Text boxes, image frames etc. Press, CTRL(PC)/CMD(Mac) + C. It autofits the frame to my content. Extremely handy I find.

How do you utilise the shortcuts?

 

[jimoblak]

CTRL(PC)/CMD(Mac) + Q.

I would prefer to script it to function automatically at 5:00 pm.

 

[MarcusStringer]

Then I had a look through the options and you can find great options and assign your own shortcuts. For example, I put in for me that CTRL+ALT+SHIFT+"+" would give me Title Case, and CTRL+ALT+SHIFT+"-" would give me Sentence. And so on. As these are options you can't set in the paragraph styles. So it was a handy work around and I didn't have to change 300 chapters of paragraph headings by mindlessly going to the menu bar and back to the text 3 million times.

I've got that setup as F1 for TitleCase and F2 for Lowercase much quicker

Marcus

http://www.midlandtypesetters.com.au

 

[MarcusStringer]

Now if the smart people at Adobe would only change it so we can have the "F" keys as sortcuts for style sheets, instead of a two button, two hand crap they have now...

Marcus

http://www.midlandtypesetters.com.au

 

[jbng]

I hear you about the style sheet shortcuts Marcus...

One thing I discovered the other day was that you can actually use shift-NumPad digit (and shift-alt, but not just alt) for a style assignment - you don't need to use Ctrl with it. So that effectively gives you six different combinations for each number pad key.

So I like to use the numbers for 'root styles' like 0 for text styles, 1 for head 1, 2 for head 2, 3 for head 3, 4 for head 4, then 5 and 6 for character styles, 7 for table styles and 8 and 9 for special or extra ones.

Then you use the modifier keys in different combinations - for example:
Ctrl for normal
Ctrl-shift for less space
Ctrl-alt for more space
Ctrl-alt-shift for no space
Shift for bullet
Shift-alt for indent.

It means you don't have to keep thinking of what your shortcut is.

The other cool tip I recently discovered is to use your mouse driver to assign the middle button (or both buttons on a touchpad) to the selection tool. Very helpful!

John G

 

[apepp]

...mine is:

apple/command + Q + out the door

: )

Andrew