Today I stumbled across a new “feature” in InDesign CC. I have encountered it before, as it mysteriously wreaked havoc on my documents. Randomly, Conditional Text Indicators would print, and fonts would be changed. But the reason eluded me. Until today. I finally pinpointed the culprit. I’ll call Hover Scrolling.
First, let’s take a look at the perfectly functional, predictable behavior that existed in CS6 and earlier. In order to change what these drop down menus do, you have to click on them and then scroll. It works great and is totally predictable.
Prior to InDesign CC, drop downs in panel never changed without my knowledge.
But now apparently in InDesign CC there is a new feature that lets you interact with the dropdown menus without ever having to click on them. Sounds cool, right? Well watch what can happen to a document without me ever having to click on any of the drop downs. All I did was hover over them and start scrolling with the scroll wheel (or even with a two-fingered swipe on a Mac OS trackpad).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5uBI77mothA&feature=youtu.be
If you have some text selected and accidentally twirl or move your fingers while hovering over the font menu, your typeface will change! I tried to replicate these behaviors in CS6, and it appears just to be a CC feature. For fun, I tried getting this behavior to work with some third party plugin panels, but it appears to only work in native InDesign panels.
So if your documents ever have changes in them that you don’t recall making, it may not be coworkers playing jokes on you or your dog walking across your keyboard. It may actually be InDesign trying to save you a few clicks. But frankly, I rather liked being in charge of choosing when to interact with the drop down menu…
This article was last modified on December 30, 2021
This article was first published on October 24, 2013
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