InDesign Secret: How to Get Rid of Excessive Overset Text
Nobody wants to spend ages manually selecting and deleting unwanted overset text that might run into a huge number of words.
Read on to find out how you can quickly and easily delete excessive text without compromising your sanity…
1. The Tip That Will Banish Overset Text from your Documents…
We’ve all been there—perhaps opened up a document from a third party to find huge amounts of overset text errors or simply made the mistake of importing too much text in the first place. Rather than spending the time manually accessing and deleting the overset text…(I mean, seriously, who has time to highlight and delete pages upon pages of text?)…you can use a simple keyboard shortcut to select all the text sitting past where you place your type cursor.
First up, you may want to find out how much overset text you’re dealing with here; which is when the InDesign Story Editor feature comes in handy.
But you may just want to get rid of that text asap, and give your InDesign Preflight the green light. If that’s the case, take the Type Tool (T), then place your cursor at the end of the section of text you want to keep. Then use this keyboard shortcut to select all the remaining text, even text that isn’t visible on the document:
Use Ctrl if you’re using a Windows system, and Cmd if you’re on a Mac OS. If you can’t find an ‘End’ key on your mac keyboard, hold down the down arrow for a few seconds instead, to select all the text to the end.
Then simple hit Delete to banish the text forever, and make your Preflight panel very happy!
Discover more about threading text in InDesign efficiently through your InDesign documents, and how to create a book in InDesign. Looking for more tutorials and tips? Head on over to our InDesign tutorials page.