Side Scrolling in Adobe – keep your hands on the keyboard

Scrolling up and down is easy. If you have a scroll wheel mouse or a laptop with trackpad scrolling abilities then vertical scrolling is a piece of cake.

If you have a PowerBook/MacBook or a Mighty Mouse then side scrolling is easy too – simply drag two fingers or roll that little ball left or right and you’re scrolling sideways.

The pain in the patootie is when you don’t have easy side scrolling. Thankfully there’s at least easy ways to do it in a few Adobe programs.

InDesign

Hold down the option key while scrolling and you’re scrolling sideways. This one has a bug on Windows though: if you want to go from scrolling one way to another then you have to click inside the document inbetween directions. Weird, yes, but so is Windows (it sucks).

Photoshop

Hold down the control key while scrolling and you’re heading sideways. Hold down option and you’re scrolling diagonally.

Illustrator

Sorry – no workie.

Acrobat

Also no workie.

Though terribly inconsistent it is nice not to have to reach for the scrollbars to get around a document.

Tagged as: adobe finger illustrator macbook photoshop powerbook scroll side trackpad