A relatively tiny new feature of InDesign CS5 that you might not have noticed yet is the inclusion of spring loaded tools. Spring loaded tools first made their appearance in discontinued Adobe LiveMotion and were also present in Photoshop CS4 (and CS5).
What are Spring Loaded Shortcuts?
When you are currently using a tool (like the selection tool) hold down the shortcut for another tool to temporarily switch to another tool and perform an action. When you release the shortcut you will be back to your original tool.
Some Quick Uses
Hold down F, draw a frame and you back to your selection too (if that is what you were using earlier)
Hold down T, draw a text frame
Hold down Z, zoom to what you need and back to editing
Hold down I, quickly grab a color with the eye dropper
Hold down U, change a gap with the new gap tool
At first it may seem like these shortcuts are not very useful, but I am already addicted to them. I had to use CS4 last week for a project and I was continuously was holding down the z key to zoom, but I was getting upset that the zoom tool was staying selected.
I should mention that the spring loaded tools obviously do not work when you are editing text (don’t worry, I tried by accident). Hopefully the rest of the Creative Suite applications add this functionality in future versions (particularly Illustrator). Let the CS6 countdown thread begin!
This article was last modified on December 17, 2022
This article was first published on May 10, 2010
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