Tabs panel doesn't work well with multiple-area text
Draw a pair of text areas side-by-side (e.g., a two-page spread). Link them and fill with placeholder text. Open the Tabs panel.
The Tabs panel wants to be the width of both columns if you click the "Position Panel above Text" magnet icon. This probably means that much of it is shooting off-screen in one direction or another, as I would typically zoom in to work with a single column of text at a time.
Go somewhere in the second area and type a line like:
"foo bar stuff"
with tabs between the words. My desire is to have the three words left, center, and right aligned with respect to their column. This is tricky given the way the Tabs panel wants to align to the text.
The panel should align and be sized to reflect the current text block (i.e., the text block containing the cursor), not all of the linked blocks.
John Bradley
shared this idea
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I see what you mean. Indeed, InDesign does snap tits panel to the area which has the cursor, while Illustrator does this only when a single text area is selected. Not very convenient to jump from these two modes (especially when there is no quick way to start editing a text with a hotkey: http://illustrator.uservoice.com/forums/333657/suggestions/38242195 — although even with it it won’t be solved).
'Ideally' — agree :) but in a practical world we have to specify these difference directly, one by one.
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John Bradley
commented
If you can briefly get a single text area selected and open the tabs panel at that that moment, yes, you can successfully get it to be aligned to the text area you're working with.
However, clicking anywhere within a text area (even an already-selected one) now selects *all* linked text areas in the chain, so you have to go out of your way to get only one of them selected. This makes working with linked text areas more than a little irritating. It probably shouldn't do that. Pretty sure it didn't do so in the past, but it's been 4 years, so who knows...
Ideally, *everything* about text should work a lot more like InDesign does.
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John, it seems like it works as we expect of it in the latest versions, and the Tabs now get positioned correctly over one column from many, when the Magnet button is clicked. Can you confirm this, plese?
