Adobe Creative Cloud

Apple keyboards are now safe for calibrated Apple LCD monitors

If you’ve carefully calibrated your monitor and you use the white Apple keyboard that came with the iMacs and Mac Pros, you may have encountered that nasty surprise when accidentally pressing the F14 and F15 keys: They change the monitor brightness.

Changing the monitor brightness is obviously a big no-no if you’re maintaining a color-managed environment, because the monitor no longer represents the conditions under which it was profiled. Even worse, you may not notice that you’ve hit the key, or you may not know how far off you changed the brightness. All you can do is re-profile the monitor. The constant risk of accidentally hitting F14 or F15 and invalidating your monitor profile is an unusual misstep for Apple, which promotes color management as a Mac platform advantage.

There used to be no way to disable or remap the F14 and F15 keys on the Apple keyboard, but thanks to newer hardware, it looks like this problem can now slowly fade into history. If you use the new slim aluminum Apple keyboard, you can require that the Fn key has to also be pressed to set brightness with F1 or F1. If you have the older white Apple keyboard, you can take advantage of new keyboard shortcut editing options in Apple Keyboard Software Update 1.1 or later.

Changing keyboard brightness control with the slim aluminum Apple keyboard

The slim aluminum Apple keyboard introduced in 2007 puts the brightness keys on the function row along with the Exposé, Dashboard, and media keys. Why is this good? Because now you can bury the brightness function. To do this:
1. Open System Preferences.
2. Click Keyboard & Mouse.
3. Click the Keyboard tab.
4. Click to enable the box “Use the F1-F12 keys to control software features.”
5. Close System Preferences.

After enabling the “Use the F1-F12 keys…” option, you must press the Fn key (to the right of the Delete key) to use F1-F12 to use the alternate labels on the F1-F12 keys, such as brightness and the media keys. That means if you accidentally hit F1, you won’t throw your system out of its calibrated state.

If you still want single-key access to Dashboard and others, just redefine their shortcuts. You can do this in the System Preferences pane for each feature (such as Dashboard & Exposé), or in the Keyboard Shortcuts tab of the Keyboard & Mouse preferences pane.

Changing or disabling keyboard brightness control with the white Apple keyboard

It turns out that Apple Keyboard Software Update 1.1 or later adds a keyboard shortcut option to disable or change keyboard brightness control for the older white Apple keyboard. To do this:

1. Open System Preferences.
2. Click Keyboard & Mouse.
3. Click the Keyboard Shortcuts tab.
4. Scroll all the way down to where it says Displays.
5. Disable the check box for “Display” Or, if you just want to change the shortcuts, click in the Shortcut column and press the new shortcut. For example, if you change Increase Display Brightness to Shift+F15, you prevent unintended brightness changes due to accidental key presses, but by adding Shift you can still control brightness with the keyboard when you really intend to.

OS X keyboard shortcuts after Keyboard Update 1.1

6. Close System Preferences.

Note: You won’t see the Display section if you’re using the slim Aluminum keyboard, only if you are using the older white Apple keyboard.

InDesign: Paragraph rules don’t show up

If you’re applying paragraph rules in Adobe InDesign but they aren’t visible, check the following in the Paragraph Rules dialog box (or the Paragraph Rules pane of the Paragraph Style Options dialog box if you’re editing a style):

  • Make sure Rule On is enabled.
  • If Weight is set to 0, increase the stroke weight.
  • If Color is set to None, give it an actual color.
  • Check the Width, Offset, Left Indent, and Right Indent. If any of these values is too high, it can push the rule outside the text frame where you can’t see it.

Last time this happened to me, it was because I had built a style on top of another style that had a large rule indent. I set the indent to 0 and the rule became visible inside the text frame.

Photoshop: Preview checkbox shortcut in dialog boxes

One of my favorite new features in Adobe Photoshop CS3 is the new keyboard shortcut for clicking the Preview checkbox in dialog boxes. Just press the P key!

Adobe wisely brought in this shortcut from Adobe Camera Raw, and it saves a lot of repetitive mousing when you’re doing before/after comparisons. It’s one of those enhancements that’s so small nobody notices, yet has a large actual effect on productivity.

InDesign: Aligning by nudging, despite fractional units

When aligning selected objects in InDesign, you can nudge them by pressing the arrow keys. In some cases it can be impossible to use the arrow keys to align two objects when either object’s position is a fractional unit, such as an X position of 124.582 points. If the second object is positioned at 124 or 124.839 points, nudging it won’t line it up with 124.582 points because each arrow key nudge is one whole point from its original position.

If you just want the two objects to line up with each other, and you don’t care what the numbers are, select both objects and use the align buttons, which you can find on the Align palette and the Control palette. If you want to get rid of the fractional units but still nudge with the arrow keys, try these other two methods:

  • To nudge to grid increments, enable View > Snap to Grid.
  • To nudge by a single whole unit of measure, first click in the X or Y field in the Control palette, and then press the up arrow and down arrow keys. When a number field is active in the Control palette, nudging snaps the field’s value to the nearest whole number.

Both techniques are slightly different ways to easily nudge object after object to the same absolute, non-fractional position.

Acrobat: Select multiple comments

Note: The following behavior is what I’ve seen in Acrobat 7 and 8 on Mac OS X. I’m not sure if it works better in the Windows versions of Acrobat. Also, this technique may not apply in Acrobat X and later because the comment list interface is slightly different.

You can select multiple comments in the Comments panel in Acrobat, but not in the way you’d expect. Let’s say you want to set the status of three comments to “Completed.” Your natural inclination would be to Shift-click or Command-click them, but it somehow doesn’t work like it does in other programs: even though you’re holding down a modifier key, the only comment selected is the last one you clicked.

To select multiple comments, you need to click just below the top edge of each comment while holding down a modifier key. For example, to select a range of comments, click the first comment you want to select, and then Shift-click just below the top edge of the last comment you want to select. It might take a little practice, but you’ll get it.