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We learned about how to create custom keyboard shortcuts in the Essential Training title,
but I want to go back now and show you a couple more features having
to do with keyboard shortcuts. Let's go to the Edit menu and choose Keyboard
Shortcuts. This opens the Keyboard Shortcuts dialogue
box, where we can assign keyboard shortcuts to various features, or change them, or delete
them, or whatever. Now I want to focus on a new feature here
called context. So I'm going to go under the product area,
I'm going to choose Tools, and I'm going to scroll all the way down here
to the bottom and choose Toggle View setting between Default and Preview.
We can see that the current shortcut is "W," and that means when I press the W key,
it's going to toggle between the Preview mode, or the regular Default editing mode.
Right? But what happens if I press the W key when I'm actually editing text in a text frame?
Well, it just inserts a w. Well, that's not what I want.
I want a keyboard shortcut so that when I'm editing text, I can go into Preview mode.
How do I do it? Well, first I need a new set, right?
I only have the default set right now, so I'll click New Set and I'm going to call this
David Set. You can call it anything you want.
Click OK. Because you can't change your default set, right?
But you can only change keyboards in a new set.
Then I'll go - oh, it reset this, so I better choose that again.
Tools, Toggle View setting, then I click in the New Shortcut field here,
and I'm going to give it a new shortcut, let's say, Option-W.
It could be anything you want, but I'm going to choose Option-W, and I'm going to give
it a context. Now again, the context let's me specify when
this shortcut is going to work. Default means it should always work.
Alerts and Dialogues means this shortcut should only work when a dialogue box or an alert
is open. There's Tables, there's XML selection, I'm
going to choose Text. Text means this shortcut should only work
when I'm actually inside of a text frame, when I'm editing text.
Now when I click Assign, we can see that I have an Option-W shortcut in the context of
text. Click OK, and we can test this out.
Right now, if I pressed Option-W, nothing happens because I'm not editing text.
But if I'm editing text and I press Option-W, you see that I go in and out of the Preview
mode. So the shortcut worked.
There's one other shortcuts feature that I want to point out, but it involves having
a separate plug-in. It's a free plug-in called the Keyboard Shortcuts
Plug-in, and I'll be talking about plug-ins later on in this title,
but I have that plug-in installed right now, so if I go to the Window menu, I can choose
Keyboard Shortcuts. I'll be showing you later on in this title
about where you can get this Keyboard Shortcuts Plug-in, but for right now,
let me just show you how I could use it to do the same thing.
I'm going to type in this field up here the Pen tool.
And I can see that the Pen tool shows up here in this list, and I'll create a Pen tool shortcut.
The default is P, but I want a new one in my set, so I'll click on the plus (+) button,
and I'll say, "I want this to be, let's say, Control-Option-P, but I want the
context to be only text." So when I'm editing text, Control-Option-P
should give me the Pen tool. Let's try it out.
I'll be editing some text down here, and I'll do Control-Option-P, and there we go.
It jumped over to the Pen tool, and now I can start drawing with my Pen tool.
It's as simple as that. Shortcuts are all about efficiency and productivity,
and taking the time now to set up your shortcuts will save you far more time
in the future. OK, now in the next chapter, we'll move on
to another productivity enhancing feature, grids, guides, and columns.