Expert: Amy - 8/5/2005

Question
Hi,
I have CS2 on a Mac, when using illustrator perviously all
shotcuts worked, but now for some reason when pressing the
Spacebar - Which activates the grab function doesnt work?  This
also applies to the Shift button when re-scaling an object so that
the constraints remain the same.  I have also found that when
pressing Apple - Spacebar which should activate the zoom
option, also doesnt work.
I have checked in Kebord Shortcuts and everything seems to be
OK. All other shortcuts work apart from these 3.  

Please help as i use these shortcuts very often and it is slowing
me down when working.

Any help will be greatly apreciated

Regards
Nick  

Answer
Hi there, Nick,

First
I'm going to assume you are working with an English version of Illustrator and a standard English keyboard with no other secondary languages or keyboard mapping active. Also, make sure that your keyboard is functioning in Roman, not unicode, mode. I'm not real sure how to do this on a Mac anymore but I think it's a keyboard Control Panel.

I'm also going to ask that you make sure your numlock, scrollock, capslock and any other keys like this are not active. My husband's laptop has some bizarre secondary menu key and it always trips me up. Anyway.

Then see if this applies to you:
When your space bar doesn't seem to work for shortcuts, both Microsoft Entourage and Office need to be updated or removed from your system. Also, you can't have the Terminal application running in the background. Users also report this problem when using a password on Entourage... none of the shortcuts on any Adobe program worked. The simple fix was to take the password off in that case.

If that doesn't apply to you, Nick:
I'm going to take a long shot here, but Waaaaay back when I used a mac, this happened to me one day.

Turns out, I had installed some Control Panel on my Mac that used these shortcut or hot keys globally.  Globally meant that applications could no longer use them for themselves.

Have you installed anything recently?  Or changed any Control Panels that may use hot Keys?

Let me know if any of these suggestions work for you???

Amy