Little Things Mean A Lot in CS3
I’m in the middle of a large production project in InDesign CS3, and as I’m working, I’m noticing how helpful certain new features are to my workflow; especially the numerous little improvements — tiny tweaks, extra checkboxes, new shortcuts — that may escape the attention of new CS3 users.
So in no particular order, here’s a short list of my favorite new CS3 “little things” that are helping me speed up production tremendously:
Double-click toggle. Just double-click on an image to toggle between the Selection and Direct Selection tools. I’m finding this handy not to actually switch tools, but as a way to quickly reveal the scaling percentage applied to an image. I just double-click on any scaled image — which switches my Selection tool to the Direct Selection one — then do one more click to select the image itself. After a quick look at the scale fields in the Control panel, I double-click again and I’m returned to my Selection tool.
Apply Style to Selection. This little checkbox at the bottom of every Styles panel lets me apply the new style I’ve just about finished creating to the locally-formatted text, object, table or cell I had selected as a source for the new style in the first place. After twenty years using layout programs, it’s a relief to have the program apply the new style to the source automatically!
Standalone cell styles. In this project I’m using a lot of single-row, multi-columned tables for figures and captions that are part of the text flow. Only a few of these lend themselves to Table styles (too much variation), but I’ve found just the cell styles on their own are great. I made different styles depending on the contents of the cell … ones with just an image, ones that are empty (to apply a background fill), ones with bold text (remember, Cell styles can automatically apply a given Paragraph style) and so on. Makes the formatting work go a lot faster.
Escape key toggle in tables. When you’re editing a cell, tapping the Escape key on your keyboard selects the cell. Tap it again, and the contents of the cell (but not the cell itself) is selected. As I edit a cell’s contents, I can quickly tap the Escape key to select the cell itself, then choose a Cell style from the panel or from Quick Apply.
Quick Apply does Menus. If you don’t want to bother creating a custom keyboard shortcut for a menu command (or can’t remember the shortcut), don’t forget you can always choose any command via Quick Apply. Press Command-Return on a Mac or Ctrl-Enter on Windows to open the little Quick Apply dialog box. Then type a word or two from the menu command and you’ll see it appear selected at the top, or very near the top of the dialog box. For example, if you type “remove,” the command that gets selected is “Remove Selected Local Overrides” which is normally a pain in the butt to get to, since it’s buried in the Pages panel menu. Press the Return/Enter key to apply the command to the selection.
There are a ton of the these little improvements in CS3. I’d love to hear which ones you’ve found to be particularly useful in your day-to-day work.
Very nice list.
Among my new favorites is the preview for step and repeat, the ability to lock individual objects on the master pages ti allow overriding everything else and speaking of master items, I like the fact that you can now wrap text on a live page from a master item.
I totally agree with you. But if anyone here is using an InCopy workflow, I think the small changes made in that area are going to be their favorite improvements. Many of the bugs and annoyances (like the auto-expanding items in the assignments panel, or problems with multi-layer documents) have been fixed at long last…
A man after my own heart. Just being able to drag a story to the assignments panel is such a simple yet powerful improvement.
Anne-Marie already hit on the vast improvements in remote workflows.
(Esc)ape Key when in Text frames!
I find that the Variables are most useful. Set up chapter no.’s automatically, paragraph numbers, running heads, etc. You can even get the running heads to match the first style on the page. It’s great.
Paragraph numbering is excellent. Not only that you can have paragraph numbering for different styles etc.
It’s all coming together nicely.
The Preference “File Handling > Images > Relink preserves appearance” that keeps the image’s appearance in InDesign whatever we do in Photoshop (resampling, rezising) when the link is updated !!!
Oh and I think it’s very useful that when you’re in the dialouge boxes that have more than one tab, you can page up and pg down to change between tabs, not sure if that was norm in CS2, I just discovered that little one for myself the other day.
Wonderful list, Anne-Marie. One note: I don’t think the Esc key to toggle between table cell and text-inside-cell isn’t new in CS3… I’m pretty sure you can do that in CS2, too.
David, yeah, you’re right. Probably mashing up the new Escape key shortcut for text frames (as mentioned by Brendan above) with the table cell one in my head.
Oh and I probably should mention what the “Escape key in text frames” shortcut is. When you’re in a text frame with the Type tool, tapping the Escape key switches to the Selection tool and selects the frame you were just in.
You can get the same functionality in CS2 by editing the keyboard shortcuts. Go to Edit > Keyboard Shortcuts, choose Tools from the Product Area dropdown menu, and select the entry for Selection Tool. You can leave the Default: V keyboard shortcut there if you want (I do). Click in the New Shortcut field, tap the Escape key so it appears there, and (this is key) change the Context dropdown menu from “Default” to “Text.” Click the Assign key, then click OK.
Try it out! Start typing some text and then click the Escape key.
Remember that Escape also closes dialog boxes without applying changes … it’s the OS keyboard shortcut for Cancel in both Mac and Windows. Adding this keyboard shortcut doesn’t override that.
“Apply Style to Selection. This little checkbox at the bottom of every Styles panel ” I can’t see this in my CS3??? As well as that, the Escape key doesn’t do anything when I have a text frame selected or activated for editing text? Am I missing a trick?
Sorry, the “Apply Style to Selection” is never active in my CS3, can’t get it to be active?
Eugene,
Try this: (1) Create a new document. (2) Drag out a text frame and fill with placeholder text. (3) Format the text any way you like. (4) With the text selected, choose New Paragraph Style from the Paragraph Styles panel.
At the bottom of the New Paragraph Style dialog, you can check Apply Style to Selection.
How this differ to the preview though? And how can it be made useful? Surely the paragraph style will only apply to the paragraph I have selected anyway. In what way does it make a difference to just making a paragraph style?
On that note, what’s the difference between just selecting the paragraph, formating the way you want it and just selecting new paragraph style, it makes the paragraph style with the options you just used. I think there is more to this techique and more to why this option is there, I just can’t see it right now.
Paragraph numbering and variables. Wow, did it take this many versions to get these simple tools?
Thanks Adobe.
Tim Macking MCT Photographer
Eugene: When you manually format text and then create a new style using that text as the source, the new style is not automatically applied to that source text. If you turn on the Preview checkbox in the New Style dialog box and then change a setting in one of the dialog box panels (like make the text size larger), the source paragraph text doesn’t change at all.
In previous versions you’d have to remember to manually apply the new style to the text after you create the style (that is, after you click OK to close out of the New Style dialog box) by clicking the style name in the palette/panel. It’s something that’s easy to overlook when you’re in a hurry.
So in CS3 they added a new checkbox to the bottom of the New Style dialog box (only in the General panel) that will actually apply the style you’re creating to the source text while you have it open. If you turn on that “Apply Style to Selection” checkbox, you can immediately see the effects of any changes you make in the New Style dialog box — assuming you’ve also turned on the Preview checkbox — because ID has applied the style to the source text for you, even before you’re done creating it.
Well I did a rather very interesting thing with the variables. I needed to have running heads matching the first heading on each page. But I have 4 different level headings. The 1st level always had to appear on the left page, so I couldn’t have the same character style for just the left page, but also to appear on the right as necessary, that wouldn’t put the Level 2 heading up there, or could I? Well I did, I used a nested style to give my headings their overall character style, called “Running Head”, then with my Level 1 headings, they also had “Running Head” character style built in to the nested style, so they would appear on the right page. I then searched all my Level 1 headings and applied a heading called Level 1 to their character style. In the variables, I put a and on the pages, then the Running Head Left was instructed to pick up the Level 1 character style and the Running Head Right was instructed to pick up the Running Head character style. This way, the Level 1 headings had two character styles applied, but only one character style would be used on the left and the other character style was used on the right. I was also able to attach the correct paragraph number to each running head. And aswell as that, when you convert automatic numbers to text sometimes the numbers appear to jump, I thought this was a fault, it’s not, if you have sections throughout your document, InDesign restarts the numbering from the section when it converts the text. The only other way (besides removing sections) was to cut and paste the text before it is converted, then the numbers came in the correct order, weird.
Ok Anne-Marie, I have done that and I see the point you are making. It is handy. What I was doing was formating my text and making a new paragraph style. It comes up as Paragraph Style 1 in my Paragraph Style panel. When I edit that the option is greyed out. It is in fact just when I alt-click (on pc) the Paragraph Style button on the Panel that I get the New Paragraph Style dialouge box, or access it through the fly menu. I have always formatted my text then selected the create new style option from the bottom of the panel menu. Thanks for clearing that up. It makes sense now.
Eugene,
The problem in the past was that if you selected a formatted paragraph, then decided to create a new paragraph style based on that paragraph, the selected paragraph would not have the newly defined paragraph style applied to it until selecting said paragraph style while the “based-upon” paragraph was highlighted or the cursor was within.
I’ve seen the scenario many times where a user will apply the paragraph style throughout, forgetting to apply it to the initial paragraph the style was based upon.
The little checkbox, when defining a new paragraph style, simply saves that extra little step of applying the paragraph style to the paragraph after the fact
the word paragraph uttered: 11 times
Eugene, ah, got it. I see now why it was always grayed out for you. Double-clicking an existing style always, automatically applies that style to the current selection, so of course the “Apply Style to Selection” would not apply (and thus be grayed out).
I see where the problem comes from. I suppose it is an easy mistake to make. Even when you create a new paragraph style it doesn’t automatically apply this style to it, it bastardises the Basic Paragraph style, meaning you have to actually click the new paragraph style. Weird.
And I just noticed, I used to be able to TAB between Type Size and Leading and Kerning etc. when I had type selected on the top bar, I can’t any more, I TAB it goes back to my text? Same thing on the Paragraph Panel, I can’t TAB between settings for first line indent, I have to click. Why?
There are little things that have been removed too
> The Preference “File Handling > Images > Relink preserves appearance” that keeps the image’s appearance in InDesign whatever we do in Photoshop (resampling, rezising) when the link is updated !!!
Does not work with ‘Fix links’ however!
Doesn’t it say “Dimensions”?
When you relink to replace one graphic with a different source file, you can keep the image dimensions of the file that’s being replaced or you can display the incoming file in its actual dimensions.
Choose InDesign > Preferences > File Handling (Mac OS) or Edit > Preferences > File Handling (Windows).
Choose Relink Preserves Dimensions if you want images to appear at the same size as the images they’re replacing; deselect this option to have relinked images appear at their actual size.
On a more positive note, NOTES is an excellent tool. I love it, I can place markers in my text that I want to ask authors about, when each query is answered, I can find and insert and all that. Or if I remove text that I’m not sure about I can simply add the text to a note, it puts in a marker, then if I need to insert it I can convert the note back into text. This is excellent, as many a time, I would have boxes after boxes on the pasteboard and not sure where I got it from as text moves, but boxes don’t (unless you anchor them of course). NOTES RULE
Hi Anne-Marie. I work for a company called Mac&Beyond, I’m putting together our newsletter and was wondering it i could use some of your tips in our hints and tips section?
Thank you.
Vikki, sure, go ahead. Just be sure to include attribution and gushing praise for InDesignSecrets.com (and that you’re reprinting with permission).
Some great tips and comments here.
Eugene, hope you’re keeping well. Don’t know if you heard I left and Gar is now in charge. Glad to hear you are now using Indesign CS3. I have to agree with you about the usefulness of variable text.
Speaking of little things, no-one’s mentioned the fact that control/command-tab now cycles through open documents, a la Photoshop. Am I the only person who finds this a welcome addition to the workflow?
Alan, are you sure? That doesn’t work on my machine. I use Command-` (the key next to the 1 on a US keyboard) or Command-Shift-` to move through open docs.
At least on the german keyboard layout uses Command-< to switch thru open documents – OS X-wide, not only in InDesign.
I have a severe problem with CS3 (german): my font Minion Pro (OTF) which I use perfectly since years with OpenType capitals dows not appear in CS3 with the capitals AT ALL. InDesign just makes it small letters no matter what I do.
In CS2, same document: perfect.
CS3: small. Does anybody have an idea why or does anyone have the same problem?
Thanks for the ESC-the-textobject-tip, great (so we get rid of this annoying »v« letters in texts). I must add that the best way to do this IMHO is still how FreeHand does:
it simply get by itself when you klick out of a textbox so it changes to the black pointer. Doubleklicking the textbox again and you are in write-mode.
Keep up the great work here!
I might be missing something, but in CS2 I could lock the dimensions of an image and then enter a desired size. The image and graphic frame would scale together. Now in CS3, when I follow the same procedure, only the graphic frame scales. Not the content?
In indesign CS2 you could switch through open documents using the Ctrl+~ key (on Win anyway).
And Ctrl+Tab was invaluable when you want to choose the selection tool whilst editing.
It took me quite a while to get used to the new ESC shortcut to activate the selection tool. In CS2 it would have undo’ed your text changes.
Dan, here’s a post with some information about scaling in CS3.