Indesign Secrets

I posed a question to Thomas Phinney at Adobe recently (master of all things font-related) regarding the priority that InDesign considers fonts. That is, if you have four versions of Arial or Times or some other font on your computer, which one is InDesign really going to use? In some cases, the answer is “All […]

I was having terrible troubles with Data Merge last week because I was getting this message about “the data source file you selected either has no records or is not a supported file format” every time I tried to choose the tab-delimited file that contained my data:

This was just a simple file exported from Excel! I opened the file back up…

Why do so many people want their all the text in their documents converted to outlines? Don’t answer that; I’ve heard the reasons, and they all make me sad. Nevertheless, some people do want all the text converted, and they find themselves up a creek because Type > Create Outlines doesn’t always give them what they want. Specifically, paragraph rules (rule above/below) disappear. Bullets and numbering disappear. Underlines and strikethroughs disappear. All kinds of stuff disappears, and that’s not good.

Fortunately, there is a better way to convert text to outlines…

We get plenty of questions regarding InDesign’s preflight feature, but they usually come down to, “What the heck?!” Here’s the problem: InDesign’s File > Preflight feature doesn’t totally suck, but it isn’t particularly good. However, because InDesign tends to be chock full o’ great features, users keep thinking, “I bet I just don’t get it. […]

Have any damaged InDesign files laying around? Markzware wants ‘em.
Markzware, developer of the Quark to InDesign conversion plug-in, Q2ID, is enjoying recent publicity for their role in helping a desperate designer recover a toasted InDesign layout, one so damaged that InDesign just couldn’t open it any longer.
As reported by David in an earlier post, the […]

Anne-Marie has presented a session on “The Zen of InDesign Repair” at the last couple of InDesign conferences, and it’s always well-attended. After all, anyone who has been using InDesign for a while knows that sometimes (fortunately not frequently, but sometimes…) files get corrupted, or weird stuff starts happening in the program.
She talked about this […]

In the continuing soap opera revolving around whether InDesign CS3 is compatible with Apple’s latest operating system version, Leopard, a new chapter has been added, but the serial continues. On Monday, February 11, Apple released the latest update to Leopard—10.5.2. While it included a very large number of bug fixes and enhancements, it does not […]

A client of mine sent me a problem child InDesign file — a legacy file in which she needed to move threaded text frames around and modify them — and this question:

I managed to lay out the text in a chapter the way I wanted but when I got to the end I started having trouble with the questions and problems text. The subhead “Problems” and all the text following it seems to have disappeared completely. I tried looking at the text threads but still can’t seem to find the text, although I know it’s there.

An update to Adobe InDesign 5.0.2 and Adobe InCopy 5.0.2 has been posted today on the Adobe website. As of this writing, the update is not yet available from Adobe Updater. Sadly, it does not fix the Leopard (Mac OS X 10.5) problems with InDesign (see below).
Here is the link for the Mac and for […]

I’ve been recording InDesign training movies for lynda.com recently (trying to finish up my InDesign Beyond the Basics title). I got to the part about the Preferences dialog box and I suddenly realized that my internal script about Preferences isn’t entirely true. That is, I have always said, “changes that you make to the Preferences […]