One of my favorite new “little” features in InDesign CS3 is that the control panel will now “expand” to take advantage of wide screens. For example, my 15″ MacBook Pro, has a width of 1440 pixels, so when I’m editing text, and I put the Control panel into “character formatting” mode, I can see all the character formatting I’m used to, plus some paragraph formatting in the Control panel (instead of just one or the other).
Imagine the following three lines stretching across the screen (plus another bit at the far right that includes the Bridge button and the control panel flyout menu):
On an even wider screen, I believe you get even more of the paragraph formatting controls. When you switch to paragraph-formatting mode, the controls swap so that all the paragraph controls show up on the left side of the Control panel and as many of the character-formatting controls as will fit appear on the right side.
Similarly, when you have an object selected with the Selection tool, you get more features than ever before in the Control panel. Here are some of my favorite new ones:
Updating the Control panel doesn’t seem like such a huge deal, but these features mean that I can do more work with fewer clicks and fewer panels open at the same time. Yay!
This article was last modified on December 18, 2021
This article was first published on April 2, 2007
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