Lesson A: Navigation

• To get started, open the downloaded document called 2 Frames & Shapes.indd. When you do, you’ll be looking at its title page, a fine place to start our conversation. To manage the missing fonts message, follow the instructions in “Procure a Few Fonts” (page 19).

Vital Keyboard Shortcuts

Throughout this chapter, and this entire book, you will find the following shortcuts to be very handy. A much more comprehensive list of shortcuts can be found in the Appendix.

Warning: The shortcuts that have you tap or hold down a letter key will not perform the listed function if your text cursor is in a text frame. You’ll end up typing that letter—maybe many times! In this situation, tapping the Esc key removes the application’s focus from your text (if that’s where it was), or in any case will do no harm. Now you can use any shortcut.

While working in InDesign, the application maintains a recovery file that’s stored in the same folder as the file you’re editing. If your computer crashes, upon relaunching InDesign, the recovery file opens right where you left off. This recovery file also gives you unlimited undo, accessed via Edit > Undo or ⌘-Z/Ctrl-Z.

Another Warning: Undo is your best friend most of the time. However, it does not undo actions that have no effect on page items. That is, you cannot undo zooming. I’ve watched many a startled student accidentally zoom, then attempt to recover by using ⌘-Z/Ctrl-Z, only to remain zoomed in, but having lost a previous (and wanted) edit. My advice: learn the shortcuts to fit a page or spread in the window as well as those to zoom!

• Have a look at the Tools panel on the left side of your screen. Which tool is currently highlighted? Let’s make it the Selection tool, the topmost one resembling a black arrow, by clicking on it. If you leave your cursor hovering over it, you’ll learn more from the tooltip that appears briefly. The name of the tool appears and, in parentheses, the keys that you can use to access it. Tapping the V key selects this tool when you’re not editing text, and the esc key selects it when you are.

Hover over other tools and note that many of them also have letters that can be used to access them. Most are not intuitive (M for the Rectangle tool?!). Try it: tap the letter M. The highlighted tool changes to the Rectangle tool. Go from tool to tool: V (the Selection tool), F (the Rectangle Frame tool), Z (the Zoom tool), and back to V again.

That’s one way to use those letter shortcuts. There’s another variation that’s really useful when you need a tool for only a moment, which we’ll discuss next.

Zooming & Panning

Please check your Preferences (⌘-K/Ctrl-K), and if there is a section called GPU Performance, be sure you’ve disabled Animated Zoom.

• Now try this…make sure the Selection tool is selected, then instead of tapping the Z key, I want you to hold it down. While it’s held, the cursor will look like a magnifier. With that cursor, drag a box around an element on the page (the name of the document, perhaps). After releasing the mouse, release the Z key. The active tool should be the Selection tool. If it’s the Zoom tool, you may have twitched or bounced your finger on the Z key. To zoom back out to view the whole page again, use ⌘-0/Ctrl-0 (that’s a zero).
• Practice this a few times to make it less foreign. It goes like this: hold letter > use its function > release letter. I know no one who zooms recreationally for minutes at a time. When we need to get a closer look at something, we need the zoom function for only a second or so. This “spring-loaded” tool shortcut gets us back to the tool we need without any trouble, and it works for any tool that is accessed by a key.
• Another time this comes in handy is when you’re using the Hand tool. Once zoomed in, hold down the H key. The cursor becomes a hand, and you can drag left, right, up, or down, and then release the H key to return to the Selection tool again. This is a fabulous way to pan. A less intuitive, but larger alternative key for the Hand tool is the Spacebar.

Warning: In all of these cases, however, you cannot use these shortcuts while actively editing text or else you’ll get lots of z’s, h’s, or spaces in your document.

Page Navigation

There are several ways to navigate a multi-page document. In the lower-left corner of the document window is a page menu, from which you can choose a page to go to, or you can click on the arrowhead buttons on either side of the menu to go to the next or previous page, or the first or last page. You can also double-click on a page icon in the Pages panel. The Properties panel has a page menu, too. Finally, there are shortcuts: shift-page down or shift-page up go to the next or previous pages respectively.

• In the 2 Frames & Shapes document, I’d like you to look at page 2. Once there, let’s look at the whole spread: choose View > Fit Spread in Window or use the shortcut ⌘-option-0/Ctrl-Alt-0 (that’s a zero, not an O).

Now when you navigate pages, the buttons at lower left go to the next and previous spreads. Also, in the Pages panel, instead of double-clicking a page icon, you can double-click on the pages numbers, and this will take you from spread to spread. There are shortcuts for this, too: option-page down or Alt-page up go to the next or previous spread, respectively. This document has only two spreads, and one of them has only one page, so this is not yet an exciting development. But in longer documents, this will be quite useful.