What happened to Option+Arrow to duplicate & move text?

Forum|Forum|3 years ago
May 19, 2022
4 replies
352 views

I used to be able to duplicate text and move it with the Option+Arrow keys, the same way you can duplicate and move an object. I use this feature all the time for objects and used to use it all the time for text as well. In more recent versions of Illustrator, however, it doesn't work for text anymore. Is this a glitch or is there some preference I need to change or has Adobe simply thrown away this useful feature?

I know there are other ways to accomplish the same thing, like duplicating my text layer in the Layers Menu and then moving it. But when you have lots of pieces of text to move in precise increments (example: making a game board that has text on the spaces), Option+Arrow was always the best way to do it.

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Tonya5F90Author

Participant

This has been driving be nuts for a while now. Why in the world would they REMOVE such a handy feature?!

Bill Silbert

Community Expert

The best answer to that is that the people who do the program updates are not day to day users of the program. Therefore they don't usually have any way of knowing what is important to daily users and what's not. You can submit this as a feature request at https://illustrator.uservoice.com.

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Tonya5F90Author

Participant

Thanks! I didn't even know about the feature request thing. I went and requested it.

Mike_Gondek10189183

Community Expert

That is sad they took that away after all these years being so quick and easy.

You can also double click the Selection tool to get to the move menu, then hit copy. Then use Command D to power duplicate.

Kurt Gold

Community Expert

I seem to remember that this indeed worked in older versions of Illustrator.

Admittedly not as easy as it used to be, but you could now select the text object, hit the Enter key to open the Move dialog and then hit the Option key + Enter key while the focus is on the Horizontal or Vertical Move text box.

Doug A Roberts

Community Expert

This seems to be reserved for increasing or decreasing tracking for text. I can't tell you if this is a recent change as I never used it.

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