Comments on: No, You Can’t Use F Keys for Style Shortcuts

By: Lisa A

Lisa A — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 13:16:17 +0000

Heavyboots, I’m with you! As a dyed in the wool Quark user and AR typesetter, the biggest frustration on switchover to InDesign was having to remove my right hand from the mouse to apply character styles using the number pad while activating the modifier keys with my left hand, when my usual working system was CMD-F1, CMD-F2 etc with left hand and mouse-based type selection with right. A real slowdown and lack of energy economy. Perked up a bit when I discovered the joys of the eyedropper tool, but still a bit of a bugbear of mine.

By: Phil Frank

Phil Frank — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 19:28:36 +0000

For those of us (few??) who never work with numlock turned on, being able to assign paragraph styles ONLY to the keypad is, in David’s terms, crazymaking. I’d prefer to be able to use the regular number keys. My feeling is that we’re all old enough to make our own decisions and to live with the consequences thereof rather than having Adobe making them for us.

By: heavyboots

heavyboots — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 18:37:15 +0000

It depends on your organization. In XPress, we used F-Keys and even regular keys. The way we kept them separate from command keys was by adding “control” to any style shortcuts. So you couldn’t just take over F1 or cmd-S, you had to do control-F1 or cmd-control-S.

The nice thing about it is simply that you can apply a style with just your left hand for high-speed styling. Most people can’t stretch their hands to cover the modifiers and the numpad at the same time.

By: Loic

Loic — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 14:28:08 +0000

To be honest, I like rather F keys as shortcuts for what they are now. Of course, for styles it v=can be convenient. But I remenber a time when I worked in a team with quark xpress.
A few found smart to attribute f keys to styles. So when I worked on the file a moment later and tried to access some palette, it did’nt work anymore cause xpress was told to apply a style at this time.
It made me so crazy, I swore never apply F keys to styles anymore.
Loic

By: Bob Levine

Bob Levine — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 13:22:08 +0000

Every laptop I’ve seen has number keys that can be used with an additional modifier key (usually Fn). Not great but working on a laptop is never any fun, IMO.

By: Roland

Roland — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 08:02:57 +0000

Klaus, the only way I know to overcome that laptop issue is to buy one of those USB-numpads for laptops. Or you could invent that incredibly cool sounding (and probably overly-expensive) gadet Eugene talked about.

I don’t like using shortcuts for styles though. They confuse me too much, especially since I work on several files a day, all with their own styles.

By: Klaus Nordby

Klaus Nordby — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 01:06:30 +0000

Well, what annoys me in this department is that (unless I’m wrong, oh frabjous joy!) we cannot assign style shortcuts to *anything* but the infernal numerical keypad number-keys — and laptops don’t ordinarily have that (yes, I know here are huge laptops with keypads and that a pseudo-keypad entry mode is possible with adding a function key). Are there any clean, simple, free solutions to this headache?

By: Rob Cowpe

Rob Cowpe — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 00:06:04 +0000

Although I constantly use many styles in my documents, I never use keyboard shortcuts (mainly because the styles are created by the projects editors and I map their styles to mine, so that when the copy flows into ID it gets styled automatically). So I want the numeric keypad available for what I want, not what Adobe wants to give me. I don’t like using the regular keyboard numbers (especially on an Apple keyboard) I prefer the numeric keypad. So when I hit cmnd 2 for a change in view size, I want to do it the easy way – on the numeric keypad. Adobe – give me my keypad back.

By: David Blatner

David Blatner — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 21:31:13 +0000

Philip: No, just the style shortcuts are stored in the document. The regular application shortcuts are stored with the app. My point was that if Adobe let users set a paragraph style shortcut to the same thing as an app shortcut, then there could be issues.

By: Bob Levine

Bob Levine — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 21:19:44 +0000

If you’re a scripter you could write a script to apply the style and assign a keyboard shortcut to that.

Hardly seems worth it, though.