InDesign: Zoom and current selection

Posted by Pierre Igot in: Macintosh
January 6th, 2005 • 5:25 am

I don’t know about other InDesign users, but I get caught all the time… I am working on a multi-page InDesign document. I go to page X to make a change. The change involves selecting something, and possibly switching to the text tool to type some text.

Then when the change is made I use Page Down or Page Up or the Pages palette to go to another page (page Y) in the document to do something else. And the first thing I do when I get to page Y is to type cmd-+ to zoom in, because I need to seem some detail up close.

What does InDesign do? Because the current selection is still some object on page X, as soon as I hit cmd-+, the program jumps back to page X and zooms in on that object on that page.

Needless to say, it’s not what I wanted. Worse still: Once this has happened, there is no easy way for more to go back to page Y. I have to scroll down/up to that page manually all over again.

The work-around is obviously to deselect whatever is selected on page X before going to page Y and then pressing cmd-+. But of course I always forget that extra step. And so I get caught all the time…

I can understand the original intent behind this behaviour. Instead of zooming in randomly on a page, when the user presses cmd-+, InDesign tries to zoom in on the current selection, because that’s probably what the user wants to see up close.

But surely once the user has scrolled to a different page, there is no way that his intention when pressing cmd-+ is to zoom in on the selection on the original page!

Compared to Microsoft’s software, Adobe programs such as InDesign and Photoshop are fine. But there are still too many behaviours like this one that are simply wrong, yet have never been fixed.


One Response to “InDesign: Zoom and current selection”

  1. Olivier says:

    Now that you mention it, I’m very surprised that I’ve never been caught by this one yet. It’s only a matter of time, I believe.

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