Monday, January 11, 2010

InDesign drag and drop tricks

You can "drag and drop" to cut and paste text from one location on the page to another in Adobe InDesign, but the feature is disabled by default. To enable it, visit Preferences > Type, and select the "Enable in Layout View" option under the "Drag and Drop Text Editing" heading. Then, if you select some text with the Type tool, you can drag the text to a new location, and the text will be cut out of the original location and pasted in the new location. In other words, the same results as choosing Edit > Cut and then Edit > Paste, but easier.

Here are some useful modifier keys that you can use with drag and drop:

Hold down the option (Mac) or alt (Windows) key after you begin to drag to enable a copy and paste, leaving the text in the original location and copying it to the new location.

Add the command (Mac) or ctrl (Windows) key while dragging to create a new frame for the text you are dragging.

Add the shift key while dragging to cut or copy the text as “unformatted” text, so it inherits the formatting of the surrounding text (this is new in InDesign CS3).

Of course, you can combine any of these shortcuts. For example, add option-command (Mac) or alt-ctrl (Windows) to copy the text to a new frame.

2 comments:

אלכסיי קלצל said...

Thank you, it is interesting.

none said...

I always hated drag-and-drop text editing because I tended to unintentionally do it, creating a mess of language that I prayed I could undo. However, I became a fan of a similar concept in InDesign: duplicating a placed image by holding Option and click-dragging the image. For me, it's easier than both copyin and pasting or using the duplicate function.