Peter wrote:
Thank you for hosting the best resource around for any software program. All companies should have someone like you guys as a resource to refer their user base to. Here is my question: Is there a keyboard command (or a way, at least) to copy paragraph formatting from one paragraph to another such as one could do in QuarkXPress with the Option+Shift+click shortcut. I used this all the time in XPress and miss it in InDesign.
Thanks for the kind note, Peter! I agree: I always liked that shortcut in QX. I thought for sure we had covered this on the blog before, but I can’t find any reference to it, other than back in Podcast 13. The bad news is that there is no keyboard shortcut or key/mouse-click combination. The good news is that you can do exactly what you want using the Eyedropper tool.
The Eyedropper tool is a wonderful little tool, though it can drive a person batty figuring out how to use it. After you choose the Eyedropper tool (or press “I” when not editing text), you can click any paragraph to pick up its formatting. You’ll know you got it when the eyedropper cursor “fills up” with a mysterious black liquid. If any text was selected when you clicked with the Eyedropper tool, then whatever formatting you clicked on is applied to the selected text, even if it was in a different text frame.
Note that this indirectly points out a weird feature of the Eyedropper tool: If you have some text selected when you switch to the Eyedropper tool, that text remains selected! Then when you switch back to the Type tool (press T), you’re back editing that same selected text.
Here’s an even weirder (and more powerful) Eyedropper feature: After you “pick up” some formatting, you can apply it to any other text in your document (or any other open document) by clicking on a paragraph (or drag over the text to apply the character formatting). That makes it a great way to apply formatting in many places with just a few clicks.
The Eyedropper tool can pick up and apply many more attributes than text formatting, of you can set it to just pick up certain aspects of text formatting (just character and not paragraph formatting, for example). To adjust what the Eyedropper picks up and applies, double-click the Eyedropper tool to turn attribute checkboxes on and off before you use it.
This article was last modified on December 18, 2021
This article was first published on August 12, 2007
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