Betalogue

Following my blog post from last week (‘Find Previous’ in Adobe InDesign), I actually got some feedback from Vipul-Bansal, an InDesign engineer, on the Adobe Forums:

We had tried really hard to just provide two buttons “Find Previous” and “Find Next” but there were quiet [sic] a few design limitations because of which we can not implement it.

1) We have introduced a new search scope “To Beginning of Story” and we wanted the search scope drop down to populate on the basis of “Search Direction” i.e. we wanted to have either “To End of Story” or “To Beginning of Story” depending upon the whether the user wants to search in “Forward” or “Backward” direction. So it becomes mandatory for the user to select one particular direction and then perform the search operation.

2) Similar to the above reason it also becomes mandatory for the user to “select a direction” before performing “Change/Find” operation. And it would have been impossible if we would have provided two diff. buttons for “Find”

It has been mentioned in the shared blog post that there is no shortcut to change the Search Direction, but we have implemented it. You can use the default shortcut : Ctrl+Alt+Enter(for Win) or Cmd+Opt+return(for MAC) or you can also edit the same by going to Keyboard Shortcut>Edit Menu(Product Area in the KBSC dialog)>Toggle search Direction.

I won’t discuss the validity of the justifications given here. But it is true that InDesign CC 2014 also includes a command called “Toggle search direction” in the “Edit” menu section of the “Keyboard Shortcuts” dialog box:

I’ve assigned the command-shift-option-G shortcut to it. (It’s already assigned to a command, but it’s a baseline grid-related command that I rarely use.)

With command-G assigned to the “Find Next” command, I now use the following Keyboard Maestro macro:

Et voilà! This macro effectively switches the search direction, jumps to the previous occurrence, and then switches the search direction again. It’s simple, but it pretty much works as a way to make InDesign behave like a normal OS X application when it comes to “Find Next” and “Find Previous” keyboard shortcuts.

This entry was posted by Pierre Igot on Tuesday, July 22nd, 2014 at 8:51 am and is filed under Macintosh. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.