Customizing the Command-I (Italic) Keyboard Shortcut

[michaelt94901112]

I'm working on a book and have to repeatedly access the Italic menu manually because the Command-I keyboard shortcut chooses the first Italic font on the menu, which is Light Italic. I have searched the internet high and low and it appears that no one has ever figured out how to make InDesign change to the standard Italic font when pressing Command-I.

Anyone have a workaround for this issue? I can't believe that many of you are not running into the same challenge.

[Mike Witherell]

If you are working on a book, then you really must use paragraph styles and character styles. Make a character style for the italic attribute. Give it a shortcut if you want. If you edit your shortcuts, you can even remap the cmd+i to your new character style.

[michaelt94901112]

Thanks for that tip. I will use that from now on!

[Bill Silbert]

The keyboard command for italics is Shift-Command-i. My tests with in InDesign CC 2017 showed that it will change the Roman version of the font to the same weight italic. Command-i activates the Spell Check feature.

[michaelt94901112]

Sorry, Shift-Command I is correct, should have known that. However, when using Open Sans regular as the body typeface, it will apply Open Sans Light Italic in all my documents, so don't know why my application varies from yours.

[Steve Werner]

Cmd+Shift+I doesn't always produce what you expect. The font designer creates font association tables (I recall that's what they're called). Sometimes you'll get something unexpected. There is no way to change it (unless you have a font editor) because it's baked into the font.

[michaelt94901112 · Accepted solution]

Because InDesign does not allow you to assign a keyboard shortcut to character styles unless you have a numeric keypad, which I don't, here are two workable solutions:

Command-Enter

Enter Command-Enter/Return and then type the first few letters of, in my case, the Italic character style. This technique was fast but not fast enough for me.

Create a Script and Assign Keyboard Shortcut

Create this script in a plain text file:

app.selection[0].appliedCharacterStyle='Italic';

Save As…

Italic.jsx

Then use Keyboard Shortcuts… to assign Command-I to it (after deleting this shortcut from rarely used Spelling menu item).