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Adobe InDesign CS3 Tutorials

Navigating the Document / Scrolling and Hand Tool

Subtitles of the Movie

Let's look at the hand tool. It's located down here, above the magnifying tool. If I select it, we get a little hand on the screen. As soon as we press down, it grabs it. That's why I call it the hand grabber. And just drag around the page, like this. This is really, really great for moving around, especially when you're zoomed in. So let me zoom in on an area here, like this and I'm going to go back to the hand tool, press down and just drag around like that. Very similar to the navigator tool that we saw in the previous one, but you can do this while you're working. Now, if we go back to the selection tool, we have it selected, but like the magnifying tool which we saw a couple of movies ago, there is a way to activate this tool without actually having to go down and select on it and that is to hold down the Spacebar. When you hold down the Spacebar, it comes up and when you release it, then you're back with whatever tool you were using. If I'm using the direct select tool, press down the space bar and it comes up. If I'm about to draw something with a rectangle, go down, release and I'm back to the tool that I want here. Let me select this tool. Now there is a little difference when we're choosing the text tool. First of all, if I've got nothing selected, no text selected and hold down the Spacebar, it comes on. Now, I'm holding down the Spacebar now, but the hand tool hasn't activated. But as soon as I press the mouse button down, it activates, so it seems to work just a little bit differently with the text tool. However, if you're in text like this and you hold down the Spacebar, well, look what happens. You create a lot of spaces. That's kind of normal. That's the way it's supposed to work. So you have to use a modifying key and that's the alt or option key. If you hold down the alt or option key and then hit the Spacebar, there we've got it. We've got our little hand grabber tool like that. Again, alt or option and just hold it down. In fact, you don't even need the Spacebar and just drag it around release and we're back to the text tool. Now, let me come up and select the text tool, but I'll have nothing selected here. When I hold down the alt or option, the hand grabber doesn't come up. I actually have to be in text, like that and there it lets me do it. Again, as soon as I release, it switches back to the tool that I was on. So it would be nice if it could be both ways here so that whatever modifying key you have, it would work no matter what tool it is, but at the moment you've got to remember both. It's something I use an awful lot. Any time I'm moving around, need to move around a little bit to see something, I'm constantly holding down the Spacebar just to scroll across a little bit before I move on to my next action.

Tutorial Information

Course: Adobe InDesign CS3
Author: Brian White
SKU: 33790
ISBN: 1-934743-02-X
Release Date: 2007-08-29
Duration: 13.5 hrs / 244 lessons
Work Files: Yes
Captions: For Online University members only
Compatibility: Vista/XP/2000, OS X, Linux
QuickTime 7, Flash 8

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