Now if you want to at this point, you can go ahead and click OK just to make sure that that is all set and stored inside our preferences. But there is something new here inside of InDesign CS2 which is very worth pointing out.
We come over here to the Layers palette on the lower left hand side. Just click on it to expand it and do not forget, there is the Links palette which we now have access to. We do not really need that keyboard shortcut anymore. Under the Layers palette, if you choose the small fly out menu here at the bottom of it, you can see the standard options for it. One of which, when we are working inside the document, is the ability to choose a new layer. There is no keyboard shortcut for that. What happens is when you create a new layer, it creates it with just a default name, layer 1, layer 2, layer 3 and so on. You normally have to use a modifier key when you create a new layer in order to bring up the dialog box. When you are inside of InDesign CS2, it is the ability to assign keyboard shortcuts to any of these palette options as well, anywhere inside the interface. So we are going to be using a lot of layers inside our design. I think it is a good idea if we have a keyboard shortcut that causes out force when we need it.
So just exiting that for a second, we can close down the Layers option and let us go back up to the Edit Menu and go down once more and choose keyboard shortcuts and we can double check that we are inside the name set that we saved and then here under the product area, we have seen one of the menu options, but this is the brand new one, Palette menu. It is hidden right here on the center. If you go ahead and choose that you can now see every single command that is stored in every palette inside of InDesign, so this just opens up a whole new world of customization for the program.
Now what we are going to do is just scroll down to roughly in the middle where it gives us the Layer palette options. Here is the new layer option. Just going to go ahead and select that. Come down to the new shortcut function here. Let us go ahead and choose Shift Ctrl or Shift command on the Mac and the number 5. We are not going to use the numbers 3 or 4 here because those are reserved on the Mac for screen capture functions. Go ahead and click the Assign button on the right hand side there. And then the final thing I want to show you which is incredibly cool inside of InDesign CS2 is to come back up to the Product area menus and this time, go down and choose the Window Menu. You now scroll down to the bottom of these commands and you will see that we have the ability to save the keyboard shortcut for up to five different work spaces.
Now we have already created two work spaces so we can assign at least two. Let us go ahead and select the command to say “load the first work space”. Come down to the keyboard shortcut and let us use Shift Ctrl 1 or shift command 1 on the Mac. Go ahead and click Assign and then just for the second work space, select that and assign Shift Ctrl 2, go ahead and click the Assign button and finally, click OK.
The last thing we need to do then to test this out is simply jump between those two work spaces and double check if we hit Shift Ctrl 2 to see it reorganizes our work space and activates our color workspace, the second one, that is the reason we saved it with the number 2 in front of it because otherwise they are stored alphabetically and then if we hit Shift Ctrl 1, we then go back to our default workspace.
So it is simply by arranging workspaces, our preferences and our keyboard shortcuts, we have now got InDesign in a position that is going to be very efficient to work with.
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