Did you know that when you are copy and pasting text in InDesign, you have 2 clipboards at your disposal?
If you turn on Drag and Drop Text Editing in Preferences > Text, you can copy and paste or cut and paste via drag and drop, independent of the clipboard used with Edit > Cut, Edit > Copy, and Edit > Paste.
In other words, you can copy some text to the clipboard with Edit > Copy, and then cut and paste some other text via drag and drop, and then still paste the first text you copied by choosing Edit > Paste.
Some handy shortcuts to use with drag and drop text editing:
* Add the option/alt key after you begin dragging to copy the text instead of cutting it.
* Add the shift key after you begin dragging to cut or copy the text without formatting (which will cause the text to adopt the formatting of the surrounding text)
* Add the Command (Mac) or Ctrl (Windows) key after you begin dragging to create a new text frame for the text.
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5 comments:
This is great news! I've grumbled to myself many a'time wondering why I can't have that feature only to find out it was there all along!
Note: It's under Preferences > Type (not "text") and you'll want to click "Enable in layout view"
Is this for CS6 only?
@Jason, this works at least as far back as CS3.
Drag and drop doesn't always work for me, even when I have it turned on. I select the text I want to move, but it doesn't let me drag it anywhere. Boo! (I suspect some weirdness in my very customized proprietary Win7 64-bit work machine.)
Great tip, thanks.
I had absolutely no idea that such a command existed in the preferences in the first place.
That is going to change a bit the way I work in InD but for the best!
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