The Case of the Missing Keyboard Shortcut
“It was about eleven o’clock in the morning, early in March, with the sun not shining and a look of hard wet rain in the clearness of the foothills. I was wearing my….” OK, different detective story!
I was reading messages on the InDesign Macintosh User to User Forums, and came upon this question from Fray:
My short cut Command+Option+5 is not working to get to the zoom percentage box. I’m updated to 6.0.1 and OS X 1.0.5.6. Repaired permissions. (It’s also not working in CS3.) I even tried assigning a new command to it and it still will not work.
Time to put on my sleuthing outfit: I opened up InDesign CS4 (6.01) on my MacBook Pro, and found that even though the keyboard shortcut appeared in the list in Edit > Keyboard Shortcuts in the Views, Navigation Product Area, the keyboard shortcut indeed wasn’t working. And changing the shortcut made no difference at all.
Next, I opened up InDesign CS3, found the same keyboard shortcut, but there it did work to highlight the Zoom Percentage field in the Status Bar at the bottom of the window.
But now, there was a strange turn of events: I turned on my trusty old Window XP computer, and cranked up InDesign CS4. I went to Edit > Keyboard Shortcuts, and, in the very same version of the application—InDesign CS4 (6.01)—there was no such shortcut! Mystery of mysteries: It had vanished!
It was time to bring in another detective. On another forum, I put out the call for help. To the rescue came famed slueth, Jean-Claude Tremblay, from Quebec, Canada. He pointed out that I no doubt had the Application Bar turned on on the Macintosh. With the Application Bar open, the Zoom Percentage Field appears there.
He wisely observed that:
The shortcut Cmd-Opt-5 is only working when the application bar is off and the zoom field return to the bottom left [Status Bar]. Seems like the shortcut was never hooked to the Zoom Level field in the Application Bar.
The problem is solved! To make the keyboard shortcut work, you must turn off the Application Frame (Window > Application Frame). Once you do that, you can also turn off the Application Bar (Window > Application Bar). That returns the Zoom Percentage Field back to the Status Bar.
However, I think that this is also a bug which must be fixed. The shortcut should also work when the Zoom Percentage Field is in the Application Bar.
I like the Application Bar so I’ll just give up the kbsc I guess. And on Windows, you can’t hide the App Bar.
That was my conclusion too until the bug is fixed. I’ve gotten to prefer the Application Frame in the background (which requires the Application Bar).
By the way, there’s a off-topic back story in the writing of this posting:
I like to have a good lead, and that title (“The Case of the Missing Keyboard Shortcut”) had popped into my head, so of course, I was thinking of the beginning of a traditional detective story like one of the Raymond Chandler novels. I don’t happen to have any of those hanging around my house. How could I find one quickly so I could dash off a quick story?
The novels aren’t in the public domain yet, but then it hit me: They may be available for the Kindle on Amazon.com. I don’t own a Kindle, but I had just downloaded Kindle for the iPhone, and downloaded a sample book yesterday. I went to Amazon.com, and sure enough there were the major Raymond Chandler novels. I bought ($7) “The Big Sleep,” transferred it to my iPhone, and I had the introductory paragraph for this story (only slightly modified).
Reminds me of “The Singular Affair of the Suddenly Unwilling Shortcuts”, a nasty tale about the operating system and system utilities wandering the background, snatching innocent shortcuts for themselves…
I’ve seen it more then once. Suddenly, usually between 23:30 to 2:00 am, you get the call… it’s one of your best paying customers on the other side… it’s his XP machine, one (or some) of his most favorable shortcuts refuse to obey his commands… “it’s a mutiny!!!”.
– “What did you do?”
– “Nothing. It just stopped doing that thing that it should do when I do that thing I always do.”
…25 min later: “…but my son installed a new NVidia graphic card.”
Ladies and gentlemen, here’s you shortcut snatcher. It’s the highly enhanced, super magnificent, multi feature loaded, graphic card utility that runs in the background. Just start it,tunnel through its maze of features to the place where you can pull the plug on those shortcuts, and you’re saved — that is until that utility finds out about it and turns them back on (and it will).
On the Mac it’s much simpler, either you lose all your shortcutting ability (that known OS 10.5 and CS3 bug), or the system will not allow sharing her assigned shortcuts with you (usually the ones assigned to the Universal Access System Preferences), unless you turn them off (that is if you can turn them off).
This is one of those things which is really easy to fix with a script…
Here’s a very simple script which presents a dialog which allows you to select, or type in a new zoom value. Just give it a shortcut (command option 5 comes to mind…), and you’re all set.
Enjoy!
http://in-tools.com/indesign/scripts/freeware/ZoomToDialog.zip
I’d like indesign to be able to access my webcam, then the web cam can track my eye movement and zoom in or out with a serious of blink commands. I shouldn’t have to use keyboard shortcuts or scripts for this.
@Eugene:
That’s easy:
var zoomLevel = app.readZoomThoughts();
var bt = new BrainTalk();
bt.target=indesign;
bt.body="app.activeWindow.zoomPercentage = zoomLevel";
bt.send();
The only hard part is installing this in your brain!
@Harbs: LOL!
Thanks Harbs – I knew you could do it – you can script anything.