By: David Blatner
October 12 2007 • 1:31 AM
Keyboard Shortcuts Plug-in: The Movie
Curious about the free Keyboard Shortcuts plug-in from DTP Tools and InDesignSecrets.com, but you’re not exactly sure what it does or how to use it? Click on the Play button below to watch a (also free!) movie about this revolutionary* new plug-in.
(*Well, okay, “revolutionary” might be a little strong. How about “pretty cool and very useful”?)
I have to login to view the video? Login with what?
The movie wants a logoin UN / PW?
Might want to have a look at it David.
When I click on the Play button all I see is the QuickTime logo with a “?” even though I have QuickTime installed.
Sigh. Sorry folks! I think it’ll work now, though you may have to Refresh the movie window to load the new HTML. Obviously, I’m still new at this video thing. Lots to learn.
Yes, it’s working fine now. Thanks!
That’s just great
thank you.
It’s a very useful little tool but I have one editorial comment about the interface. Should not ‘Ignore Unassigned Shortcuts’ read ‘Ignore commands to which shortcuts have not been assigned’ or, more briefly, “Ignore commands without shortcuts” or something of that sort?
Thomas
Hm. Yes. True. Perhaps in the next version we’ll just shorten that to “ICTWSHNBA.” Or something of that sort.
Nice work-very useful and much appreciated.
Yeh one more editorial comment… you should have called it ““S.S. More Powerful Than Superman, Batman, Spider-Man, and the Incredible Hulk Put Together.”
I have an operational question. In the built-in shortcut editor, there’s a Save button that doesn’t seem to do much. But my experience is that if you remember to click Save before leaving the editor, your set is protected against a crash losing your settings.
I crash InDesign a lot. And I mean a lot. I’ve probably submitted a dozen crash reports in the last week.
So, I looked around the new plug-in for an equivalent and found the Save Set menu item. But this requires me to find a location to save the set as a .indk file. My question is: where should I save the file?
I’d been putting it in Application/Adobe InDesign CS3/Presets/InDesign Shortcut Sets, but I’m wondering if I should have been using Preferences/Adobe InDesign/Version 5.0/InDesign Shortcut Sets/
Anyway, the point of my question is that I keep crashing and losing the shortcuts I’d added to my set using your plug-in I guess I’ll just try to other place and see if that helps — won’t know until I crash again.
Could you post the link to download this plugin?
The link is in the post above… but to make it more explicit: http://www.dtptools.com/kbsc
Dave, in my experience, the Keyboard Shortcuts plug-in always saves the shortcuts I create, even when I force quit (faking a crash). I wonder why yours isn’t?
However, note that the Save Set feature in the Keyboard Shortcuts panel is different than Save Set in the dialog box. I apologize for the ambiguity here. The panel’s Save Set feature is located next to the Load Set feature, indicating that this is for saving a whole set out to give to someone else to Load (so you can share your keyboard shortcuts set).
I know what happened. There’s a limitation (maybe even a bug) with shortcut sets. On my Mac, they can live in one of two places: Presets in the Application folder or in Preferences. It happens that I had a set named “My Set” in Presets.
I had forgotten that, so when the plug-in asked me where I wanted to save, I saved into the folder in Preferences.
As long as the current session continued, the new set was used. But the minute I restarted (didn’t need a crash, but that’s the usual reason I restart), InDesign knew the name of my set but not the location.
So, don’t have two shortcut sets with the same name in those two locations. That’s a limitation I can live with.
What pushes this over the edge to bug status is that the system said it was using one of my sets when it was actually using the other.
Thanks a lot for creating this! It sure makes the process much easier… maybe Adobe will pick up your lead and include something like this in CS4
Hey, don’t forget to try holding down the Shift key when choosing About from the plug-in’s flyout menu.
Wouldn’t it be nice as well to be able to ‘Ignore Commands with Shortcuts’ so you simply get to see the commands that don’t have a shortcut. It’s a good way to find out if any useful command is missing a shortcut.
When I hit play to view the tutorial it kicks me back to the home page of InDS. Little help finding the tutorial?
Thanks
Marc, thanks for letting me know. It’s fixed now. (Problem arose from when we moved to a new server.)