I was working on an InDesign project over the weekend. At one point I had a series of five images in a row, like this:
I needed them all to rotate 20 degrees around their centers. So I made sure the center reference point was highlighted in my Control panel, then entered “20” in the Rotate field. I got this:
Argh. I didn’t want the group to rotate, just the individual images. Then I remembered, oh yeah, I need to use the Transform Individually command. So I chose Undo to un-rotate the selection, then went to choose Transform Individually from the Object > Transform menu:
Ummm … hmm. I could’ve sworn there was a Transform Individually somewhere in this program. Maybe in the Transform Again menu (even though I wasn’t doing anything “again”)?
Hmph! It appears there *is* no Transform Individually. Must have been a parallel universe I was thinking about. I already know about Transform *Again* Individually, but as you can see it’s greyed out. Undoing my previous, mistaken rotation wiped the action from InDesign’s memory.
In other words, you can’t get there from here. To transform each object in a multiple selection *individually*, you have to get the transform action into InDesign’s memory first. Apply it to something. And then “do it again” to the selection.
An elementary lesson in InDesign, but still aggravating.
We need a “Transform Individually” check box in each of the Object > Transform dialog boxes like Rotate and Scale. It would only wake up when it detected a multiple selection. A reasonable feature request, which I submitted … fingers crossed for CS4.
In the Meantime …
Here’s what I had to do:
1. Deselect my group of five images.
2. Select one of them.
3. Rotate it 20 degrees.
4. Deselect it.
5. Select the remaining four images.
6. Choose Transform Again Individually from the Object > Transform Again fly-out menu.
The end result:
Was that so hard, InDesign? It’s the little things like this … the tedious, repetitive monkey work that software apps sometimes make you do, that really get under my skin.
This article was last modified on December 18, 2021
This article was first published on October 4, 2007
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