Is there a way to prevent triple click select from selecting the newline character at the end of paragraphs? This little evil anti-feature is causing me so much grief...
I too use keyboard shortcuts for this. On a mac: Put your cursor anywhere in the text you want to highlight. Command + Up Arrow will put you to the beginning of the paragraph. Then Command + Shift + Down Arrow will highlight the whole paragraph, including the extra character you don't want. Don't release Command + Shift. Do release the down arrow and hit the left arrow once. This will un-select the character you don't want.
Type away, then Cmd + Down Arrow to get to the next paragraph you need to swap. (adding in shift brings in highlighting/selecting text.)
This sounds complicated, but it's really quite simple, and super helpful in general for selecting text and navigating text. Give it a go for a bit and get your fingers used to it. (Swap control for command if you're on a PC).
Keyboard shortcuts are *almost* always faster than all mouse-clicking. I generally keep my left hand on the keyboard and right hand on the mouse. There's so much you can do. But it takes time to train your brain. If you do end up sticking with the mouse, the trick I use to avoid selecting the last character is to start with your mouse to the right of the last character and drag/select up and left. This always avoids selecting the invisible return.
Wow, that's one horrible bummer... What I'm doing is converting some tabulated data into book format. So I would make a formatted paragraph, copy it as many times as entries in the table then select paragraphs and copy-paste the content from the other application. Should be a pretty common thing, right?
So, what's happening is that all the information I have is in a separate xls file. I first tried to include everything, including lengthy descriptive paragraphs in tables, but it was ugly, hard to work with, inconsistent and it resulted in massive multi-part tables, so it had to go. What it looked like is circled red on the right. So now I'm separating the descriptions into normal paragraphs in text frames as seen on the left. That's a half complete section, I did the titles of the weapon mods, but not all the descriptions yet. But for example if I were to change the title line for "Infrared Mode" to something else and did a triple click to select and then pasted the new thing, the new text would appear at the start of the next paragraph with the base style in base style format.
I can try and make you a simple script that will select only text in the Paragraph - but I'm not at home right now.
Or you can try asking "ai"?
It would be quite a simple script.
And it could be two versions:
1) you just put cursor in the text and it will select paragraph without the enter,
2) you'll do triple click and script will deselect enter.
Then you can assign keyboard shortcut to either script.
keep pressing Ctrl + Shift and hit (left arrow), edit: forgot about this step
hit Ctrl + C.
For pasting:
first four steps would be identical,
hit Ctrl + Shift + V - paste without formatting.
If there is some kind of a pattern - of source and destinations - like same number of paragraphs and their location - and you're on Windows 😉 I can give you access to the full version of my ID-Tasker tool - for free for some time. Then you'll only have to select source and then destination - Stories or TextFrames.
You could grab the first column of data and use Table > Convert Table to Text to convert it back to plain text. Then apply your styles, probably quicker than copying and pasting each entry.
Ooh, this would have saved so much time! I finished the conversion from the old format earlier today :D Thanks for taking the time to replicate the table and recording the video. That's above and beyond <3 (Btw, are you Hungarian?)
Not Hungarian, just was inspired after a history of photography class in college when we talked about Lazlo Moholy-Nagy, a Hungarian photographer/painter in the Bauhaus movement.
Shift left arrow in this program extends the selection to the left rather than changing the selection based on cursor movement. It comes up less often, but still annoying :D Feels like whoever coded the text entry tool did a generally good job but just never used a conventional text editor before and so they missed a couple of things that are normalized everywhere else.
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u/dragonhydra37 1d ago
I too use keyboard shortcuts for this. On a mac: Put your cursor anywhere in the text you want to highlight. Command + Up Arrow will put you to the beginning of the paragraph. Then Command + Shift + Down Arrow will highlight the whole paragraph, including the extra character you don't want. Don't release Command + Shift. Do release the down arrow and hit the left arrow once. This will un-select the character you don't want.
Type away, then Cmd + Down Arrow to get to the next paragraph you need to swap. (adding in shift brings in highlighting/selecting text.)
This sounds complicated, but it's really quite simple, and super helpful in general for selecting text and navigating text. Give it a go for a bit and get your fingers used to it. (Swap control for command if you're on a PC).