Tip of the Week: Instant Pull Quotes
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Do you often have to add pull quotes to layouts? Do you do it by creating a new text frame, copying and pasting body text, and then styling it? Here’s a better way. First, go to Type Preferences and enable Drag and Drop Text Editing in Layout View.
Then select the text for your pull quote in the layout.
Start dragging the text, then hold Command+Option (Mac) or Ctrl+Alt (Windows), and drag and drop the text where you want the pull quote to go. InDesign copies the text and puts it in a new frame.
Now, if you want to get really slick, create an object style that applies the paragraph style for your pull quote and auto-sizes the text frame.
And for the icing on the cake: use Quick Apply to apply the object style to the pull quote text frame.
Once you’ve done the set up work of creating the object style, from then on creating a pull quote will be a 3-second job.
The Drag & Drop option is brilliant. Saving little periods of time really adds up over the course of a long job.
Nice one, Mike. As if I should work even faster!
Exactly how I’ve done that for years!
My workflow is slightly different though.
Select the text. CMD C – hit esc – CMD V – produces a text frame.
Set up shortcuts for the Object Style, using the number pad.
Then setup shortcuts to Align the Text Frame to the margins, left, right, center, top and bottom using the Number pad.
7 – 8 – 9 top left center or right
4 – 5- 6 middle left center or right
1 – 2 – 3 bottom left center or right
With a few keyboard commands I can create pull quotes and align them on the page roughly where I want them or move them handy enough.
Mike-
This is drop-dead brilliant!
All of this works fine, I think, except the pull quote box does not anchor to the text. I have tried to anchor it in the Object Styles for Anchored Objects options, but since the text frame never anchored, it won’t apply.
Unfortunately this does not work with footnote text as easy as with “normal” text. Or did I miss something?