248 Keyboard shortcuts for special characters

- [Voiceover] Do you know how to type the character for the Section symbol or the Hair Space or the Sixth Space? People don't usually spend a lot of time trying to remember obscure keyboard shortcuts like that. Because, if you need those characters, you can always find them by simply placing your cursor inside of a text frame, heading up to the Type menu and then choosing from these Insert pop up menus like Insert Special Character and then Inside Symbols, you can see, there it is, Section Symbol. Or for a white space, I would go to Insert White Space and then choose Hair Space or Sixth Space or something like that.

In Design has a ton of special characters like these and if you only need them occasionally, then the menus are fine but if you find yourself needing to type them often, then you really want a keyboard shortcut. Some of these special characters actually do have shortcuts and you can see them up here on the right edge of the menu. But, many others don't but that's okay because you can create your own really easily, here's how. First, go up to the Edit menu and choose Keyboard Shortcuts way down here at the bottom.

When you choose Keyboard Shortcuts, you want to make sure that you have a custom set. Don't use the Default Set here. Instead, click New Set and then give it your own name. I'll call mine "David Set" then I'll click Okay. Next, you'll need to find the command you're looking for and every In Design menu item is listed inside one product area or another. In this case, I'm going to choose Type Menu and then I'm going to scroll down this long list of commands until I find Insert White Space.

Here we go, Insert White Space and I'm going to use a Sixth Space. That's a space which is one sixth of an M. Now that that's selected, I'll come down here and click in the New Shortcut field and you can type any keyboard shortcut you want. For example, I'll press Command+S or Control+S on Windows and that is obviously already assigned to something else and we can see that down here. Currently assigned to Save. Now, I could click the Assign button over here to take it off of Save and then apply it to this menu but I don't wanna do that so I'm going to choose something different here.

I'll press Control+Option+Shift+S on the Mac or on windows you could do Command+Alt+Shift+S, I don't know, try it. You can pick anything you want in here. Next, I'm going to change the context from Default to Text and that tells In Design that this keyboard shortcut should only work when I'm editing text inside of a text frame. Finally, I'll click Assign and it adds that shortcut to the list of shortcuts up here. Now, I'll click okay and let's try it out. My text cursor is flashing just before that M dash and I'll press the keyboard shortcut and it types that space.

I'll come over here and try it again. Looks good. Now, there's actually another way to type those special characters without making your own custom shortcut. It's a really good one to keep in mind because if you're only going to use a special character occasionally but you still wanna keep your hands on the keyboard, then remember your friend Quick Apply. Here's how you do it. Maybe I'm editing this text down here and I find that I want one of those sixth spaces. So, here, even if there is a keyboard shortcut, I might not remember what it is.

So, in that case, all I need to do is press Command+Return or on Windows Control+Enter and up comes the Quick Apply menu. Here, I can simply type S-I-X and In Design guesses, oh you mean you want to insert the Sixth Space. Can you see that? Right here it says, Type Menu, Insert White Space, Sixth Space. It guesses based on what I type in. As soon as it's selected in that list, all you have to do it press Return or Enter and In Design will type that character for you.

Now, Quick Apply isn't quite as fast as having a custom keyboard shortcut for the character but it's way faster than having to use the mouse and menus.