[Ed. Note: This post is now officially called Why David Shouldn’t Write a Post on Too Little Sleep. See comments.]
Why is there no way to move everything from one layer to another, throughout a document? Is there, and I just don’t see it? Someone sent me a file with a layer structure like this:
The fact that there are two different Annotation layers is obviously a mistake; perhaps someone copied an object from some other document while Paste Remembers Layers was enabled, and that other file’s layer name came over? Well, now it’s a mess and I want to move everything from the Green Annotations layer to the Yellow Annotation layer.
I bet if I searched long enough I could find a script to do it. Or perhaps even tweak the IDML or INX file format or something crazy like that. But this is just an 80-page document, so it’s just faster to do the manual, brute-strength method:
- Command/Ctrl-A to select everything on the spread.
- If I see a little green square show up next to the Annotations layer, then I Option/Alt-click on the layer name to select all the objects on that layer. If I don’t see a green box, then skip to step 4.
- Drag the little green box to the Yellow Annotation layer.
- Jump to next spread by pressing Option/Alt-Page Down.
Some of you may wonder why I took the step of Command/Ctrl-A; why not just Option/Alt-click on the layer and see if anything shows up. It’s only because I know there are only annotation objects on about a third of the pages throughout the document, and it’s much faster for me to Select All to see if this is one of those spreads.
Others might wonder why I don’t just delete the layer entirely. That would be logical, but unfortunately that actually deletes all those objects, too! I wish that InDesign would ask me if I want to delete the objects or move them to another layer. (Perhaps CS5?)
This article was last modified on December 19, 2021
This article was first published on November 25, 2008
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