Adobe has packed a lot of nice features into the Creative Suite 5 apps. One of my most-used applications is InDesign, so I was quite pleased to see so many of the “little things” I’ve wanted to see for years, be addressed with this latest upgrade. I’ll be covering some of these new features in future posts, but one new feature that I’ll be using daily in my job is the new object Corner Options feature on rectangles.In InDesign 6 (CS4), creating rounded corners was serviceable at best. I could create rounded corners on my rectangle with a single radius amount, and the amount was applied to all four corners. To make matters worse for me, I had the need to only create rounded corners on two of the four sides of a rectangle. This meant I was forced to use a user script to create them – and once they were created, there was no going back to edit the radius. With InDesign 7 (CS5), Adobe has abolished all my Corner Option demons.
InDesign CS5 offers a more feature-rich Corner Options dialog box
Selecting a rectangle and choosing Objects>Corner Options… from the menubar brings up a dialog box allowing me to choose one of the familiar corner styles. As you may have noticed in the screenshot above though, I can choose a different corner style for each corner. And I can also choose a different radius amount for each of them. This is going to save me a ton of time, and many trips to the Scripts panel!
But the corner-editing goodness doesn’t end there. For many designers, a more free-flowing workflow is more desirable. For those folks, Adobe added the ability to edit the corner radius without going into a dialog box at all. When you select a rectangle, you’re offered a small yellow handle on the side of the object (as seen at right). Clicking on that yellow handle activates the new Corner Option editing mode.
Once activated, you can adjust the corner radius of all four corners at once simply by clicking one of the yellow handles which appear at each corner and dragging. A small bezel appears to let you know the radius amount. This in itself would be obscenely helpful to me, and I would have been happy had Adobe stopped there, but they didn’t.
InDesign CS5 offers numerous ways to edit corners
You can also hold the Shift key down and drag a yellow corner handle to edit only that corner. Oh yeah, now I’m stoked! And if you really want to make a mess of your rectangle, you can hold the Option key down to adjust the shape of the entire rectangle.
I draw a LOT of rounded corner rectangles, so this feature was (believe it or not) a big selling point for me. Once you use it, I’m sure you’re going to love it as much as I do.
With the recent announcement of Creative Suite 5 by Adobe this past week, and the subsequent complaining that always seems to accompany such an announcement, I thought I would type-up a quick complaint letter that interested people can copy & paste into an email and send off to Adobe. Perhaps if those of you who aren’t happy with the direction Adobe is going in send this letter to them, they’ll completely toss 20+ years of successful software into the bin and start over from scratch!
If you find yourself clicking on a tool in the InDesign tools panel and holding the mouse down to access the hidden tools, there is a quicker way that requires less mouse work from you.
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.
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.
If you have an