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I'm revising my dissertation for publication & use 12pt font for the text of the main body, but 10pt font for the footnotes. I do lots of cutting/pasting & would like to use a keyboard shortcut to make my pasted footnote text 10pt. My attempt to assign the F1 key fails. In prefs I go to menu keys, Size, Other (10) & set F1. But it doesn't take, & nothing happens when I highlight text & press F1. What am I doing wrong? Thanks,

Nick Dobson

I'm not sure I follow the steps you are taking. Are you somehow entering 10 as the "other" size in the Menu Keys tab of the preferences dialog? If so, I don't know how.

If I replicate your set-up without specifying 10 as the "other" size, I get a Set Font Size dialog when I press the menu key. I then have to type in "10" and click the OK button (or press the return key). This is true no matter what menu key I set. (Though on my first attempt, pressing the menu key immediately set the selected text to 12 points. I'm not sure why that happened.)

Are you using a notebook computer (iBook, PowerBook, Mac Book, or MacBook Pro) by any chance? If so, I think you might need to hold down the Fn key while you press F1.

Another approach is to create a character style for ten-point text and assign it a keyboard short cut. You could then select text in a footnote and apply the character style. This works for me.

--Craig

ncdobson wrote:I'm revising my dissertation for publication & use 12pt font for the text of the main body, but 10pt font for the footnotes. I do lots of cutting/pasting & would like to use a keyboard shortcut to make my pasted footnote text 10pt. My attempt to assign the F1 key fails. In prefs I go to menu keys, Size, Other (10) & set F1. But it doesn't take, & nothing happens when I highlight text & press F1. What am I doing wrong? Thanks,
Nick Dobson

In terms of nothing happening, once you have entered your key combination, are you clicking the <set> button? I have tried it and get the same as cchapin ... a box asking me for the size I want.

But here are some other thoughts. I haven't tried it in full as such and don't currently have a document on which I can, but, presuming you have set the footnote style to 10pt whatever:

(1) when you paste text into the footnote, if you use <cmd-v>, it will go in in the original font and style; use <shift-cmd-v> and you have "paste text only" and it will then be given the style attributes set for footnotes;
(2) when you have pasted in ordinarily with the pasted text's size, you will see a character tag in the status bar at the bottom ... click on that and you have the option to "Remove font" which actually removes any font settings that override those set as the default for that style, though I don't know if it is possible to assign a keystroke to that;
(3) Clicking a second time on the style in the style palette also removes any overriding style characteristics, such as font and font size ... have a keystroke already set for your footnote style, try pressing that.

Of course, if there are any other characteristics in the pasted text that you would wish to retain, such as some words italicised or in a different script, they may be lost by the application of any of the above techniques, but it might be worth your doing a bit of experimenting.
I suppose in the end, we should ask Nisus to include 10pt in the list of sizes in the menu--I don't know why they don't, they include all the other common ones--which would presumably make it easy to assign a keystroke.

Good luck,
Mark

I created a new style "10 pt" & then assigned the F1 key successfully. The whole process was much more convoluted than it should have been, but it worked in the end. Thanks for the help,

Nick D.