The Graphic Mac

While every designer on the planet would think that clicking at the top center of the circle with your text tool, typing your text and centering it would result in the text being centered at the point you first clicked; that’s not the way software engineers think. To make sense of why your text gets centered at the bottom of the circle, you must first think of the circle as a straight line – with the top of the circle being the start of the line. So it stands to reason that the middle of the line is the bottom of the circle. See the graphic below if you’re still not getting it.

So the simple solution is that if you want to center your text at the top of the circle, you must click the text tool at the bottom of the circle first – which makes the bottom of the circle the start of the line – which makes the top of the circle the center… if that makes no sense to you, then you can forget any chance of a career as a software engineer.

To celebrate the 10th anniversary of Adobe InDesign, the layout tool for print and digital publishing, Adobe is releasing a commemorative book titled “Page by Page: 10 Years of Designing with Adobe InDesign” that highlights the product’s evolution and features designers who have helped make InDesign a success.

InDesign celebrates 10 years with free e-book download

Designed to provide an inside look at the company’s stewardship in moving publishing from print to digital solutions, the 10th anniversary book examines the role of InDesign and the InDesign Family in transforming the layout and editorial workflow at agencies, corporate publishers and traditional publishers worldwide. The book also details the evolution of InDesign from its public debut in 1999 to today and includes sample work created by designers for publications such as Marie Claire, publishers like Condé Nast, and cutting edge design agencies such as Modern Dog and Mucca Design.

Adobe InDesign offers plenty of shortcuts, but there are a few that don’t get much attention that are quite handy once you get used to using them. One of the areas that is often neglected is InDesign’s ability to drag & drop text, rather than using copy & paste.

To take advantage of InDesign’s drag & drop features, you first have to turn it on. You can do this by visiting InDesign’s preferences by navigating to InDesign>Preferences>Type, or hitting Command + K and selecting the Type item in the source list on the left of the prefs window. About half-way down in the Type prefs window you’ll see the Drag & Drop Text Editing section. Check the Enable in Layout View box.

Now that the feature is turned on, you can select any text in an InDesign text frame, then click, hold and drag the highlighted text. Releasing the mouse button drops the text into place. That alone can be a real time saver when you’re editing text. But the fun is just starting…
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Everybody knows you can go to any particular page in you InDesign document by double-clicking its page icon in the Pages palette, or by typing the page number you want to go to in the little Page indicator box in the lower left of your document window. Of course, there’s always the old Command + J shortcut to bring up a dialog box where you can type your desired page number in. Here’s another page changing tip. Hold down the Option key while double-clicking the page icon in the Pages palette to not only go to that page, but switch the view to Fit Page in Window at the same time.

When working in your Adobe InDesign document, you can quickly zoom in or out on your page or spread with a few quick shortcuts. Command + Spacebar + Click zooms in on your document page, centering on the area around your cursor. Command + Option + Spacebar + Click zooms out on your document page. Double-click the Hand Tool in the Toolbar, or hit Command + Option + 0 (zero), to automatically fit the page or spread to the screen (obviously, the zoom amount will vary depending on the size of your monitor). Double-click the Zoom Tool in the Toolbar, or hit Command + 1, to view your page or spread at 100%

InDesign’s Master Pages are quite powerful, and make long documents easy to keep consistent. They do have their difficulties though when you try to alter items that are contained on the Master Pages themselves.

Easily override InDesign's Master Page items

A feature I love about InDesign is the ability to click any graphic frame with the text tool and begin typing in it immediately. However, not everyone likes their graphic frames converted to a text frame automatically. For those who wish to turn the feature off, simply visit your InDesign preferences (Command + K) and select Type in the source list on the left. Then uncheck the box labeled “Type Tool Converts Frames to Text Frames.”

If you have an InDesign object such as a text box, or an image frame in your document and you wish to remove any stroke and fill it currently has, you can do it with a quick keystroke. Simply select the object in question and hit the Slash key ( / ). This will set either the fill or stroke to None, depending on which you have active at the time. To remove the color from the other attribute, just hit the X key to switch and hit the slash key again.