August 14 2007 • 2:51 PM
By:
Sandee Cohen
What happened to the Shear dialog box, Axis: Angle command?
It’s gone. Disappeared! Vanished!
In previous versons of InDesign you could open the Shear dialog box and choose the Shear Angle (which is the amount of shearing), and then choose under the Axis area an angle for the shearing.
And now it’s gone.
You can only choose a Horizontal or Vertical axis.
This is so strange, especially since Illustrator still has the “complete” set of shear controls. Notice the Angle option.
Why would anyone take this out of InDesign? I know nobody ever uses the Angle Axis, but it is very unlike Adobe to take things out of the program.
Any thoughts?
Wow, that is kind of weird. My first guess is that it had something to do with the changes in how InDesign CS3 handles scaling. I know that seems nonintuitive, but they did have to do a lot of low-level work to change scaling and perhaps something had to give. As you pointed out, I don’t know anyone who actually used that feature.
That said, beware the slippery slope! Who knows, they might take out the Type tool in CS4!
> That said, beware the slippery slope! Who knows, they might take out the Type tool in CS4!
Type tool? What’s that?
I never use the Type tool.
The hell? I think the effect can at least be achieved using shear and rotate together (which I think is what the axis did anyhow), but that’s still really annoying. I actually do use shear every now and then, so…
Anyone remember when Macromedia took the timeline out of Dreamweaver, they had to put it back in since users kept complaining, even though Macromdia’s internal statistics said virtually nobody had really ever used it?
But we really need that shear axis angle thing back as soon as possible, though. It would make such a nice “obscure InDesign feature of the week” for the podcast …
Hey Guys, while experimenting here on this I tried the following. I drew a square. Rotated it 15 degrees, then I alt clicked on the Roate button on the Control Panel and it copied it around into a nice diamond formation after 4 clicks. Nothing to do with this, but nice, I think. It works for each of the control panel items, including flip horizontal and vertical.
Unbelievable! This was a major plus in our layouts.