Post edited 7:33 am – June 23, 2010 by Eugene Tyson

These are great – love them.Means I can work away on other things when exporting to pdf. Handy. But how do I know when it's finished? How do you know if there is a background task? There's a clue right on your screen without having to go to Window>Utilities>Background Tasks

And this only shows up when a background task is being performed.

Unfortunatley it doesn't tell you what background task is being run – nor can you double click it or use any modifier keys to open the Background Task panel.

But at least it's some sort of indicator that something is happening in the background.

So some advances could be made here

1. Allow access to the Background Task panel while clicking the indicator

2. Retain any performed background tasks as a list in the panel, so later on I can double click the task to open the PDF at a later date.

Reason for no.2 is that sometimes I want to keep working and don't need to see the pdf open so I don't always click the option in the PDF settings. But I would like easier access to my exported pdf and the Background Task panel could potentially leave me a link to open the PDF I made earlier.

Anyway – I hope that helps some people out

I wanted the CS5 upgrade for this purpose alone. Often creating a PDF and printing that goes faster than printing directly from InDesign, and the added benefit of being able to keep working while doing this is priceless.

The Background Tasks panel should indeed show a history of completed tasks. Let's hope Adobe listens to our feature requests and upgrades the panel in CS6.

Haha you don't want to know how many times I've used that form after every upgrade I'll run back there to add another one: if at all possible, they ought to put the print process, at least after all data has been gathered, into the background tasks too.