Understanding Tools

Like all Adobe products, InDesign is robust and complicated. The same objective can be accomplished in multiple ways. DORIS seeks to standardize many of the workflows to ensure consistency, but it helps to have a basic understanding of the program's tools and helpful shortcuts.

Here are the basic tools that everyone needs to use.

Selection Tool

The Selection Tool is your basic pointer tool. Select an entire object or text box and move it around, delete it, etc.

Direct Selection Tool 

The Direct Selection Tool only selects one anchor point on an object. So, if you wanted to move one specific anchor point, you’d use this tool. This allows you to, for example, distort a rectangle into a polygon by moving one corner.

Type Tool

Click and drag to create a rectangular text box, or use the tool to select text to edit.

Paths + A Few Keywords

A path is made up of one or more straight or curved segments. The beginning and end of each segment are marked by anchor points, which work like pins holding a wire in place. A path can be closed (for example, a circle) or open, with distinct endpoints (for example, a wavy line).

Pen Tool

The Pen tool lets you draw straight and curved paths. This tool is most useful when creating floorplans.

Add Anchor Point Tool +  Delete Anchor Point Tool

Add Anchor Point tool lets you add anchor points to a path. Delete Anchor Point tool lets you remove anchor points from a path.

Eyedropper Tool

The eyedropper tool is super helpful for grabbing whatever color or style attributes from one object onto another. By default, it's hidden behind the Color Palette tool ().

Visit Adobe's InDesign User Guide for a comprehensive overview of all tools.