Our friend and colleague Branislav Milic (who has been writing about InDesign in French for longer than anyone, I think!) just emailed us this fun InDesign tip:
You may know that while working on a layout, you can hold down the spacebar key to move an object while you’re drawing it. For example, while you are drawing a rectangle frame, you can hold down the spacebar (while you’re still holding down the mouse button) and drag to move the frame. Then, when you let go of the space bar, dragging goes back to resizing the frame.
The same thing goes for placing images: You can select an image or text file in the Place dialog box to load the Place cursor, then start dragging to create a frame, hold down the spacebar and keep dragging to move the frame, let go of the spacebar to resize the frame some more, and finally let go of the mouse button to finish making the frame.
I know that sounds convoluted? just try it once and you’ll understand how neat it is.
Okay, so Branislav pointed out that this works with the Zoom tool, too! (What he calls the Loupe tool.) In his words:
- “Press Command/Ctrl+Spacebar to invoke the temporary Loupe tool
- Draw an area
- While keeping the mouse’s button down, release Command/Ctrl-Spacebar
- Change slightly the size of the drawn area
- Press again Command/Ctrl-Spacebar and then move the mouse.”
“Result? You can move the selection that you drew to another area while keeping the size of the drawn area! It seems that you need step 4 only the first time you do the trick. If you want to continue to move the zooming selection area, steps 3 and 5 are enough and we can skip step 4.”
Fascinating! I suppose this would be helpful if you want to use the Zoom tool to zoom in on a particular part of your page, then — halfway through drawing the zoom rectangle (also called the marquee) — changed your mind and decided to zoom in on a different part of the page.
Thanks, Bran!
This article was last modified on December 21, 2021
This article was first published on October 10, 2012
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I noticed that if you hold down the spacebar while editing text, InDesign adds spaces. To stop adding spaces, release the spacebar. Pretty nifty. I think they added that in 5.5.
I noticed today that you can also hold down the spacebar while using the “gridfy” feature to create a grid of placed images. Holding the spacebar lets you reposition the entire grid.
Basically what Branislav is describing (and what he brilliantly found) is that all the other uses of the spacebar to move an object or placed image relies on adding the spacebar the invoke the feature.
But since the spacebar is already pressed to access the Zoom (Loupe) tool, you need to unpress the spacebar to access the feature.
This is also available with Photoshop (but, in CS5 or CS6, without the option “Scrubby zoom”)