A while ago, we started out a blog post with a thought exercise. Well, today we are going to leave the brain alone, and work on some hand-eye coordination skills.
You may be asking, what does hand-eye coordination have to do with InDesign?
Well, there are some really handy features in CS5 that require the use of both hands.
But today we are going to concentrate on InDesign's Super Step and Repeat capability, or sometimes called "gridification." It is available in CS5 only.
Let's start out easy. In an open document in InDesign CS5, select your rectangle tool. This will also work with any ellipse, polygon, or text frame, too. Start to draw your rectangle by clicking and holding down the mouse button. As you draw your rectangle (with mouse button continuously held down), use your left hand to hit the right arrow key. If you hit the right arrow key once, you'll then see two rectangles, hit it again, you'll get three. Move your mouse across the page to enlarge the rectangles until they are the size you want and only then let go of the mouse button. You have a perfect line of evenly spaced rectangles.
To summarize: to make a horizontally aligned row of perfectly duplicated rectangles, hit the right arrow key as many times as you need as you drag to the right across your page.
Oh, you want a column of duplicated rectangles, not a row? Easy! To make one column while drawing the rectangles, hit the up arrow key as many times as you need and then drag down all while holding down the mouse button.
To make a grid of perfectly spaced rectangles, say four across and four down, hit the right arrow three times and the up arrow key three times and drag diagonally down and across the page before letting go of the mouse button.
Want squares? Do all that while holding down the shift key. Come on, stretch those fingers across the keyboard!
Okay, now I am just messing with you. You don't have to hold down the shift key while hitting the arrow keys. Just hold it down after you have the number of rectangles you want, and your rectangles turn to squares.
Did you hit the arrow keys way too many times and now you have about 100 rectangles across the page? Don't worry, the left arrow key and down arrow key can remove those. Hit these keys as many times as you need to control your rectangle growth.
And to top this feature off with a cherry, you can do this while placing multiple images. Let's say you have four images queued up in your cursor (command+D, select four images, click ok). Start drawing out a frame, hit the right and up arrow keys once each as you are drawing the frame, and suddenly you have four perfectly spaced, equal in size frames. Let go of the mouse button when your frames are the size you want, and InDesign places your four images into your four frames. Ta-da!
But wait, there's more!
Let's say you already have your perfect shape on the page, you just need more of them. You may already know that you can hold down the control and option/alt keys as you click and drag on the shape to create one duplicate. But with the new Super Step and Repeat, you can control+alt click your object, and then while holding down the mouse button, let go of the control and alt keys, move your hand over to the arrow keys and hit the up or right arrow keys to make multiple duplicates of that shape. Moving around your duplicated objects with the mouse (before letting go of the mouse), redistributes the spacing between your duplicated shapes. Used this way, the Super Step and Repeat doesn't change the size of your shape at all, it only changes the spacing between your copies.
In fact you can have one shape at the top left of your page, then control+alt click and drag to make the second shape, then, all while holding down the mouse button, move that second shape to the bottom right of your page, and then use the arrow keys to fill your page up with a beautiful grid of shapes.
Okay, if you haven't already opened up your InDesign CS5 to try this, you probably are dying to now. So I won't keep you. Have fun exploring the fabulous possibilities of this new capability in InDesign.
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