Hotkeys for Bold and Italic?

[sheldon1963]

I'm sure this easy and I'm dumb for not knowing it, but is there a hotkey for making selections bold or italic?  I do a lot of that and it would save my wrist many hours to find a way to do this.

[Peter Spier · Accepted solution]

Ctrl (Cmd) + Shift + B and Ctrl (Cmd) + Shift + I.

You'll find a nicely organized listing for all the default keyboard shorcuts as the second-to-last item listed in the contents for InDesign Help.

[BobLevine]

Note: this won't work if there's no bold or italic variant installed.

Bob

[TJenningsFineArt]

Yeah, back in the day, it would do a faux italic or bold (I forget the term that was used), and that was a bad thing. Now you have to have the actual variant font.

[gomartwo]

This isnt working for me in inDesign CC… Does this feature exist still?

[Peter Spier]

It should. Do your fonts have those variants installed? Also check your Mac system prefs and other applications like browsers to make sure thay haven't 'stolen' the shortcuts.

[Brian27472827l5wr]

I am having the same issue on Windows 10. Ctrl+Shift+I works to toggle italics, but Ctrl+Shift+B does nothing. I do not know how to check for conflicting keyboard shortcuts on Windows.

[Brian27472827l5wr]

Confirmed that the shortcut does work with other fonts, so it must have something to do with how this font is loaded. As you can see in the screen capture, there is a Bold version of both Brandon Grotesque and Calibri loaded. Yet the shortcut works on Calibri, but not on Brandon Grotesque. 

Anyone have any troubleshooting suggestions?

[Brian27472827l5wr]

Using Character Style Options, I tried manually setting the shortcut for "[None] + Bold" to Shift+Ctrl+B. This did nothing. I then tried setting it to something else (Alt+Ctrl+B) and this does work as a shortcut for Bold, including on the Brandon Grotesque font. I do not understand how this works on this font while the default shortcut doesn't.

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

Honestly, this spot override formatting is (or should be) a seriously deprecated method and feature. If you're using ID as a word processor, I guess it makes sense, but those spot bold/italic/underline overrides are a perpetual headache in stuff imported from Word and are no better applied that way within ID.

Create bold and italic character styles as needed; if you must have shortcut keys, map them to these controllable styles yourself.

[Peter Spier]

In the screen shot Calibri is a locally installed font (most likely system font on Windows) while Brandon Grotesque seems to be cloud activated. Might you possibly have two different version of that font, Adobe and Goodgle, for example? That might account for the problem.

[Scott Falkner]

It only works if the font has bold or italic variants and if they are encoded as such. THere is internal data in the font and not all Bold or Italic versions are properly linked to the normal version.

[TJenningsFineArt]

Oh my gosh! I'm so happy! I've only been using ID for decades. DERP! I'm doing a legal magazine, and they italicize all the things.

[Benjamin5D91]

This isn't working. On PC. AE version 17.5.0. The font has a bold varriant. What am I missing. I even went into the Keyboar Shortcuts tool to see if I coud reassign it to a new key binding but "bold" and "italic" does not show up at all when I search the commands. What am I missing?

[Benjamin5D91]

Nevermind. Realised this is an InDesign discussion not After Effects.

[Shiva5C84]

 sir Ctrl (Cmd) + Shift + B and Ctrl (Cmd) + Shift + I is not working so do you

have any ideas to make it correct  so could you plse replay my msg.

[massimilianoc67199682]

Using a Windows keyboard on a MacOS I find that Win + Shift + B works for Bold and Win + Shift + I works for Italic.

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

And again, spot overrides are poor practice whether they use this word-processing shortcut or not.

If you want this feature, at least create proper bold and italic styles and map them to whatever shortcut keys work best for you.

[sheldon1963]

Yup, that works like a champ.  Now if I could only select a word or series of words using only key strokes I stop using the mouse entirely.  Thanks for the help.

[Peter Spier]

Ctrl (Cmd) + Shift + leftor right arrow keys, depending on which way you want to move through the text.

[SOCS_MAG]

You rock Peter.

[Scott Citron]

Here are threeother solutions:

1. Create Bold and Italic Character Styles with Shortcuts (see screen shot).
2. Use QuickApply Ctrl (Cmd) + Enter (Return)
3. If the same text or text string always needs to be bold or italic, the easiest solution is to set up a GREP style that will automatically apply the specified character style.