UNDERSTANDING THE COPYPASTE OPTIONS

UNDERSTANDING THE COPY/PASTE OPTIONS

Almost every application affords you the opportunity to copy and paste items from one place in a document to another, or from one document to another. InDesign has the same Cut, Copy, and Paste options as any other Create Suite program, and it also gives you a number of other paste options that can help make document design easier.

All of the copy and paste options are found under the Edit menu. Cut deletes the selected item(s) and places it on the Clipboard, and Copy leaves the selected item(s) and makes a copy on the Clipboard. The Paste command pastes the cut or copied object on the page.

The Paste Without Formatting command is active when you are pasting text from another application, such as a word processor. It pastes "clean" text into your document; that is, any type styles applied in the other application are wiped out when you paste it in InDesign.

When you cut or copy content and then select a frame, the Paste Into command pastes the content in the frame you select.

When you select the normal Paste command, the object you cut or copy is pasted in the center of the document window. Paste in Place pastes the object in the same coordinates as the original. For example, if you copy something from one page of your document and want it to appear in exactly the same place on another page, select Paste in Place.

Closely related to copying and pasting are the Duplicate and Step and Repeat commands. Duplicate copies and pastes the selected object at an offset over the original object in one step. You can also duplicate an object by selecting it and then dragging with the Alt (Windows users) or Option (Mac users) key held down.

Select Step and Repeat to copy and paste multiple copies of a selected item at a specific offset. Select your object and then choose Edit, Step and Repeat. Enter the number of items you want to paste and the horizontal and vertical offset at which you want the duplicated items to be placed.