I was editing a large file yesterday, and repeatedly needed to move periods from outside closing quotes to the inside. I like to use drag and drop text editing for moving text around, but trying to select and then drag and drop a single character is infuriating.
InCopy has a cool “Transpose” command that will change the order of the characters on either side of the cursor. But alas, InDesign has no such command.
So I whipped up a quick script called TransposeTwoCharacters that does just that: It will swap the order of the characters to the right and left of the insertion point. Just put your cursor between two characters that need to be swapped, and double-click on the script in the Scripts panel. Even better, use the Keyboard Shortcut Editor to assign a keyboard shortcut to the script so that you can transpose characters with a simple keystroke.
This article was last modified on December 20, 2021
This article was first published on June 8, 2010
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