The Riddle of the Inverted Arrows: Contest Answer and Winner!
It’s time to reveal the solution—and the winner—for this month’s InDesignSecrets contest!
This time, you had to figure out the quickest way to reverse a set of arrows, so the arrowheads pointed in the opposite direction.
The answer was to select the arrows and click the Reverse Path button in the Pathfinder panel.
Choosing Object > Paths > Reverse Path accomplishes the same thing.
It was awesome to receive so many correct entries! You folks really nailed this one. It makes me think that almost everyone has had to deal with backwards arrows at one time or another.
And the winner is…
Rin Hunt
Rin wins a 3-month subscription to DTP Tools Cloud!
Thanks to everyone who entered, and be on the lookout for another contest with a new great prize next month!
My Object Find/Change answer do across the entire document with no selection xD
By the way, nice tool!
That’s right Thiago, so I did include your answer with the correct ones. And it’s the best solution if you’re dealing with lots of arrows in a long document. But in this case, I was just looking for the quickest way to fix the four arrows in the screenshot. Thanks for entering the contest.
What’s the Object Find/Change answer?
Use an Object Find/Change to search for the combination of Line Start/Line End options (in Stroke & Corner Options), and change to the opposite.
That’s a pretty nifty solution.
I have to admit I didn’t know the answer, and could hardly wait until the solution got posted. I’m pretty good with InDesign (I’ve been using since version 1.0 came out).
I knew something had to be reversed, and I immediately went to objects and tried to transform, but nothing worked.
I never thought of paths.
Thanks for the education.
Using Object styles seems to me an interesting (maybe a better) way, playing with much more transformations (color, size, effects (shadow, …). Associated to object find/replace researches, it will be cooler! ;-)
This is a WINNER! I just read this today and within a few hours I had to reverse about 8 arrows. A lot eaiser than selecting each one. Yay!!
Here was my “cheater method” involving no mouse clicks:
There isn’t a keyboard shortcut for the reverse path function, but assuming the arrows are all selected already, you can accomplish this without touching the mouse at all. Click Alt+O to expand the Object menu, Hit P to jump down to Paths, and then P again to choose Reverse Path. So click Alt-O, P, P (“Yeah, you know me!…Who’s down with OPP?”) If you know ahead of time that this is the keyboard sequence to use, it’s actually much faster than having to move the mouse to click on either a button or to select menu options.