On the Move to InDesign: Text Selections

Sandee Cohen

It’s hard to find anyone who works with page layout software who doesn’t have to select text. Although InDesign’s default settings make this the same as in QuarkXPress, there are a few differences you should know about.

Straight out of the box, InDesign’s text selection techniques are the same as XPress.

A double-click selects a word. A triple-click selects a line. A quadruple-click selects a paragraph. And a quintuple-click (rarely seen in international competition) selects all the text in the story.

As someone who grew up using XPress, I’ve never had too much trouble executing all these clicks. However, if you choose Edit > Preferences > Text, you can deselect the option for Triple-click selects line (see figure 1).

Figure 1

With this option turned off, InDesign changes the click selections as follows: A double-click selects a word. A triple-click selects a paragraph. A quadruple-click selects all the text in the story. It’s one less click to select an entire paragraph or story. It’s also closer to the text selection in Microsoft Word.

Ordinarily, that would be it, except for a difference in how a double-click is interpreted over decimal points such as those found in prices.

In XPress, a double-click anywhere within the numbers of a price selects the complete price as shown in figure 2.

Figure 2

In InDesign, a double-click over the first two numbers of a price selects only those first two numbers as shown in figure 3.

Figure 3

A double-click over the period in the price selects only the period as shown in figure 4.

Figure 4

A double-click over the last two numbers of a price selects only those two last numbers as shown in figure 5.

Figure 5

What this means is that, in order to select all the numbers in a price, you have to drag across the numbers, not double-click.

Read more On the Move to InDesign tips here.

Read more by Sandee Cohen.