You have four text frames selected with the Selection tool and you want to change the font in all four of them at the same time. You need the Character panel open, right? Because when you have the Selection tool chosen in the Tool panel, the Control panel displays settings for the object (in this case, a group of objects), rather than Type controls. The Character and Paragraph panels always show you text controls, though.
But I don’t like keeping those panels open. They take up too much space on an already-crowded screen. So what’s a guy to do?
Just press “T”.
The T key switches to the Type tool, and when the Type tool is selected in the Tool panel, the Control panel suddenly changes to show you character and paragraph formatting! No need for those other panels anymore.
So does that mean there is simply no reason to ever open the Character and Paragraph panel? Why doesn’t Adobe just get rid of those panels entirely? Here are several reasons for Adobe not to do that:
- Redundancy is good. Having more than one way to do the same thing in InDesign actually increases efficiency.
- Many InDesign users haven’t read this blog post, so they don’t know about the “T” trick.
- The Paragraph panel offers one horizontal alignment feature that the Control panel doesn’t offer: Justify with Last Line Aligned Right. (Thanks Haeme for pointing that out.)
- The Control panel doesn’t always show you the text controls you want. For example, if you select a row or column in a table, the Control panel menu displays table-related features rather than text-related features. That means you cannot apply OpenType formatting (such as Fractions) to all the selected cells. The Character panel flyout menu still offers those features, though.
There may be other reasons you want to keep the Character and Paragraph panels around. Share them below if you think of any. But I still maintain that using these panels should be the exception rather than the rule. In general, the Control panel gives you what you want, when you need it… just press T.
This article was last modified on December 19, 2021
This article was first published on May 8, 2009
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