Double-Wide CS3 Control Panel
One of my favorite new “little” features in InDesign CS3 is that the control panel will now “expand” to take advantage of wide screens. For example, my 15″ MacBook Pro, has a width of 1440 pixels, so when I’m editing text, and I put the Control panel into “character formatting” mode, I can see all the character formatting I’m used to, plus some paragraph formatting in the Control panel (instead of just one or the other).
Imagine the following three lines stretching across the screen (plus another bit at the far right that includes the Bridge button and the control panel flyout menu):
On an even wider screen, I believe you get even more of the paragraph formatting controls. When you switch to paragraph-formatting mode, the controls swap so that all the paragraph controls show up on the left side of the Control panel and as many of the character-formatting controls as will fit appear on the right side.
Similarly, when you have an object selected with the Selection tool, you get more features than ever before in the Control panel. Here are some of my favorite new ones:
Updating the Control panel doesn’t seem like such a huge deal, but these features mean that I can do more work with fewer clicks and fewer panels open at the same time. Yay!
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That is seriously cool. I recall you and Anne-Marie talking about the redundancy of the character and paragraph palettes, but I always found switching from one to the other in the control bar so annoying that I generally have the paragraph palette open all the time, and use the control bar for the character palette.
I would have preferred the Illustrator style, where if you select a text frame you automagically get the character and paragraph options in the control panel, rather than the transform and align options, which I use much less frequently in my workflow. When I select a text frame, 9 times out of 10 I want to change something about the character or paragraph formatting. I resent having to go inside the text to do that.
Alan, don’t “go inside the text” to do it! If you want to apply text formatting to all the text in the frame, and if the frame is not threaded to another frame, just press “T” to switch to the Type tool and the Control panel will change to text formatting for you (this is CS1, CS2, and CS3). I love that feature, but most people never find it.
“Updating the Control panel doesn?t seem like such a huge deal …” ? well, it’s a big deal to me, David. I have often wished for a full-width control panel to make the most of my 23″ display and now here it is! BIG deal! Yeah! :)
this is a very big deal for anyone who is big on productivity!
Is ‘expanding’ default behaviour or an option (And if so: where can one enable/disable this option :-) )
The expanding behavior is automatic. You don’t have to do anything to turn it on.
Another feature about Control panel customization that David didn’t mention is that on the Control panel menu you can choose Customize. Then you can control which Control panel buttons appear or do not appear. You can turn off the ones you never use to have more space for the ones you do.
Steve, I tried your ‘customisation’ suggestion hoping I could add some quick-click buttons for Text Frame Options (and specifically for Vertical Justification), but I have struck a big zero on that … could be just me, of course, but if either you or David have a solution for this one, I’d love to hear it! I’m so over having to control-click, select, select again and then Okay-click for this function …
Erique, note that this feature is only in CS3, which isn’t shipping as I type this. However, note that the Customization feature is not nearly as powerful as you (or I) will want it to be. While Steve was correct, you cannot actually add new features to the Control panel. You can turn off some of the features that are there, and then turn them back on again.
DOH! I fear I have been working too long and too hard … I kinda missed the bit about the double-wide, customisable control panel being a *CS3* feature … now what was that undo command, again …?