InDesign CS6 Help PDF Posted But the Content Is a Mess
I had been getting the whiff of disaster for a month or two about the Help files in InDesign CS6, and the rest of the Creative Suite. As a beta tester, I usually get an early look at the Help files but they were curiously missing this time, except for a brief What’s New in CS6 section.
When I looked at the online Help the first time after InDesign CS6 came out, my reaction was, “Is that all there is?” Major topics were left out, and the content was choppy and disorganized. There were no PDF files. Later, we were told that the PDFs would come out by the end of June.
Well, the InDesign CS6 Help PDF is now here, along with those for the other CS6 products, and it’s just as bad as the Online Help. First, you have to find the PDF file because, unlike in CS5 and 5.5 Help, there is no obvious link to it. If you start at the InDesign CS6 Menu, you logically choose InDesign Help as before.
This takes you to the InDesign Online Help which requires Internet access. It looks quite nicely designed but is pretty useless for finding topics except for the simplest top-level choices. There is no organized topic list or index. And the search is pretty miserable. Even if you specify results from InDesign it mixes in results from other applications (search for effects, and it includes Adobe After Effects). And no link to the PDF file.
To find the PDF file, instead of choosing InDesign Help in the Help menu, choose InDesign Support Center.
Over on the right are links to the Help PDF (circled below), and previous help files which are also PDF files (circled above). But they messed up the PDF files too. I already had the InDesign CS5 & 5.5 Help PDF, and I compared it with the InDesign CS6 Help PDF.
In CS5 & 5.5, the Help was organized in 25 logical chapters. You could open the bookmarks for each chapter, and you could see subbookmarks and sub-subbookmarks to see a logical hierarchy of topics. Often that was enough to navigate to the topic you were looking for. For example, here is a portion of the bookmarks on Tables:
In the CS6 Help file, there are 16 topic areas, and here is what the Tables topic looks like in the bookmarks:
That’s it. To find a subject related to tables you have to make your best guess, then scroll through to try to find what you’re looking for.
It gets worse. If you have a longer topic, the subtopics are not arranged in a logical order for someone who is learning the subject, they are arranged alphabetically. Say you wanted to try to find out about the settings in InDesign’s Print dialog, probably the most common search for a beginner. In CS5 and 5.5 Help, that topic is logically placed first:
Look at the Print topic in InDesign CS6 Help:
A beginner has to figure out that what they want is most of the way at the end in Printing documents.
And it gets even more infuriating: Important topics are hidden in unlikely places. There used to be a logical chapter on Long Documents. Now it’s a mismash: Creating an index is placed in the Text topic. Creating a book file is in the Layout and design topic.
Other topics are only available in the Online Help (it’s not like it costs more to produce a longer PDF!) Look for something basic and important like creating an InDesign Template. You’d expect it would be in the Create new document subtopic, right? If you scroll to the bottom of that subtopic, you see these links:
These are links to the Online Help! You can’t read them in the PDF document. Why? I have no idea.
The CS 5 & 5.5 Help was 705 pages. The CS6 PDF Help is 621 pages. That includes an oddly arranged What’s New section that includes What’s New in CS6, CS5.5, CS5, Arabic and Hebrew features, Liquid Layouts and Alternate Layouts, Forms. So material was moved out of the PDF for no apparent reason.
It’s not only InDesign users who are unhappy with the Help files, other Creative Suite 6 customers are as well. You can read some of their comments on the Community Help Application forum. Here are a couple threads of complaints:
Adobe Help Is Purposely Gimped.
It’s too bad that the help Adobe provides for its increasingly more powerful and complex applications gets worse and worse. It means that you’ll have to rely even more on websites like this, books like Real World InDesign and InDesign Visual QuickStart Guide, and online and in-person instruction to learn InDesign.
It gets worse for me – when I select InD Help from the Help menu, I get a dialog box saying Help Viewer is not installed and I am not connected to the internet, please check your internet connection or reinstall InD.
I can run Help manually [C:\Program Files (x86)\Adobe\Adobe Help] but most files are shown as ‘pending download’. I click update on the InD reference (16MB) and get a progress bar for extraction. This continues without any progress, even though other updates work fine for me via the Adobe Application Manager…
I don’t know why Adobe Help is excluded from the program updates. I thought Adobe Help used to show up in the AAM program list with the other programs? Is this a glitch in my installation?
This is why I stopped being an early adopter of new versions of any software.
I now wait for the first major bug fix or service pack – as a freelancer I can’t afford to act as an unpaid and unwitting beta tester for a software company. I have deadlines to meet.
Adobe now has nearly unchallenged dominance in graphics software. It just recently bought its way out of the ‘Free Freehand’ lawsuit, so it doesn’t really need to care about its customers – where they gonna go, right?
Until a competitor comes up with something better – and then releasing poorly written documentation may hurt sales.
I still like and use many Adobe products, but monopolies breed arrogance and sloppy quality control.
And, ironically, Adobe’s near-monopoly is not just unhealthy for innovation – it’s unhealthy for Adobe itself.
I have multiple versions of CS installed on the same volume (as a freelance finished artist I have to have them) and now, since installing CS6, selecting help in any version of InDesign, Illustrator or Photoshop brings me to the near-useless helpx browser page. Fine, let Adobe wreck the help system for CS6 users but, for XXXX sake, why on earth did they have to meddle with previous versions?
So it’s not just me. I went looking for help over the holiday weekend and found little to none. The “forms” functions don’t work the way I expect them to, and there’s a measly page and a half about them in Help.
Pull up the PDF properties for a real laugher:
I thought seeing FrameMaker 8 was bad on the ID5.5 PDF, but Illustrator? For a 621 page book about their flagship book-building software? No wonder it’s a mess.
The biggest problem (IMO) is having a set deadline for software release (2 years for major versions, dot-5 versions in the interim) AND compound that with all software in a suite having to be ready at the same time.
The result: software released with missing features (almost ready, but not in time) and software with known bugs (to be fixed on an update later on).
Steve, I honestly didn’t mean for my post this morning to be a follow-up on your post… it just happened that way! :) But I’m glad to report that Real World InDesign CS6 is shipping at last. Maybe that will take the sting off the documentation debacle.
I’ve just spent a half hour trying to find information about the Auto-Sizing text feature new to CS 6. The online help was of no help.
The closest I got to any information was a tutorial posted to You Tube featuring Anne Marie talking about the feature. Fortunately I learned everything I needed.
Then I got a clue to come read this article. (Thanks Steve!)
I found the PDF, downloaded it, and entered Auto-Sizing in the Find field. No result, even though Auto-Sizing is the label for the menu.
So I tried Auto-Size. Ahhhh. It found an entry. And this is the sum total of the entire section on the new Auto-Size feature:
Actually, I didn’t get the HTML tag right. Here’s the whole thing:
Persistent text frame fitting options
Auto-size text frame options make it possible to set up a text frame so that it is automatically resized when you add, delete, or edit text.
To access the Auto-size options, do the following:
Note:
To the top
1. Select a text box and choose Object > Text Frame Options
2. Click Auto-size.
OK, I think I’m getting obsessed by this. I had recently complained to someone that the online help used the term “text box” instead of “text frame.”
It’s one thing when students call them boxes, but when Adobe does it hurts.
So I decided to search through the Help PDF for instances of “text box.” I found:
To flow text between connected frames (also
called text boxes), you must first connect the frames.
Also
1. Select a text box and choose Object > Text Frame Options
Seems like Adobe has given up on their own nomenclature and is using Quark’s. I’m surprised since so few people use QuarkXPress any more.
I don’t mind a simple statement that Quark’s text boxes are InDesign text frames. But there should be an attempt to train the users to think correctly.
But then I continued my search and found at least a hundred entries for text box in the instructions of where to type information in a dialog box.
For all my years working in computer program we’ve called these empty spaces “text fields.” I’m surprised to see Adobe change the language.
“Use Spacing from the Control panel, type the space value in the text box, and press Enter or Return to confirm.
I’m even more surprised to see this substitution of text boxes for text fields in the CS 5.5 Help file.
OK, I give up!
Nothing more from me on this topic.
I was originally a Quark-user through version 6, but this disclaimer aside, perhaps Adobe is finally adopting “box” in its nomenclature because it is more logical and intuitive to people. “Frame” always seemed to me to be a way for Adobe to differentiate themselves from Quark’s terms early on and somehow make its converts look fancy with their special terminology. But “frame” to everybody outside the page layout world intuitively means something like a picture frame or lumber framing–basically the *edges* around something.
“Frame” as a name for the container never made any sense. “Box” makes more sense to new users and non-users than “Frame”; “Container” with its connotations of holding something would be even better though it’s a longer word. I have learned to use “container” or “box” in my book specs over the years because the editors who DON’T use InD but have to deal with it anyway find these so much more understandable. The edge of the box is the “border rule.” I just avoid using “frame” altogether to describe book elements because of what Adobe has done with the word.
In the end, we all want to understand each other. Perhaps Adobe finally understands this; perhaps it’s just one lowly help copywriter thinking intuitively and not a huge conspiracy.
Why, where is this wondrous free video by Anne-Marie that explains Auto-Size text frame feature in InDesign CS6? :D
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XrUkWnkYrjA
@Sandee ? it hurts so much: the “text box” is back again?
But, stop! There is a new page object and that is called “TextBox” (here I refer to the JavaScript documentation of InDesign CS6).
“TextBox: A text box. Base Class: FormField”. And that is a totally different kind of thing?
I did not check the PDF documentation of InDesign CS6 to verify, if Adobe mixed up “text frame” with the new “text box”, but will do that in a spare minute?
Uwe
Real question: How can one trust a company that botches on-line help to provide an efficient, secure ‘Creative Cloud’?
You had a podcast earlier in the year where one of the InDesign engineers was a guest (I can’t find it now, nor recall his name). Something he said hit me like a ton of bricks. He said he enjoyed working with the engineering team in India.
I have no direct evidence of this, but this “Help” débâcle smacks of outsourcing to me. It doesn’t always mean that outsourcing guarantees inferior results, but this disorganization, wrong nomenclature, illogical listings, et al, smells like it’s from a team that’s come late to the party.
Marty
I’ve been getting positive feedback for my blog post from a number of people.
Most gratifying was this comment from one of the Community Help Application forum threads I linked to above:
https://forums.adobe.com/thread/1011863?tstart=0
Kirsty Aho of the Adobe Staff posted:
“I want to assure you that a whole slew of folks on the Community Help team have read your very thoughtful and thorough post and all the comments.
Vikrant, the InDesign content and community lead, has already fixed a number of the content-specific issues and will repost the PDF shortly. It will take us a bit more time to fix some of the navigation concerns. We made a lot of design changes with this release and will work out all the kinks.”
Thanks for the detailed feedback on the InDesign CS6 help PDF.
We have made the some updates and posted an updated PDF. We will continue to optimize the content and keep updating the help systems periodically.
Feel free to reach me at virai [at] adobe (dot) com or or via twitter @vikrantrai for any concerns that you may have.
Thank you Vikrant! It’s always heartening to see Adobe’s responsiveness to the professional community. Downloading the new PDF now …
Thanks, Vikrant. It’s somewhat improved in organization and content, but isn’t completely up to the CS5/5.5 version. Booksmarks are still only two levels deep.
Thanks for the improvements, and keep up the good work!
Obviously taking a cue from Microsoft. Office 2007/10 help is next to useless, but at least it is provided.
My impression was that they’d just harvested the HTML help content and slapped on a cover that had been created in Illustrator (hence the Illustrator identity in the PDF Properties). In the past, the User Guide PDF was clearly of independent ancestry, and was always much more detailed.
First, they stopped putting user guides in the box, but at least they included the PDF of the guide on the install disks. Then they stopped that, and only provided the PDF online. Now, it’s further dissipated. I guess CS7 will just include a link to InDesignSecrets.com!
Seriously?
One needs help after reading this help!
Guess I’ll start authoring some help files.
I am a professional graphic artist, using Adobe software for more than 23 years now.
Adobe software is getting worse with each new version.
I recently upgraded to master collection CS6, setting me back 1600 euro!
For this kind of money you would expect proffesional software, but all the programs in the suite are unstable, slow and in NOT ONE the help system is working!!
It used to be normal to press F1 and get CONTEXT sensitive help. Well normal? Adobe allready skipped this in CS4 and maybe earlier. ( I skipped versions CS, CS3 and CS5 ).
Anyway, in any reliable software even from small companies like Smith Micro or Corel, the help system is superb: instant relief when pressing F1 and very professional pdf ‘s that explain every aspect of their software ( in fact a reference book ).
Adobe apparantly is turning into an amateur club, not knowing anything about it’s own products.
ADOBE: shame on you!
In my case ( I am running the suite under windows 7 on a i7 with 8gb ram ), in After Effects clicking help does not do anything at all, no online help, no offline help, no warning, nothing. In No other program of the master collection I will get offline help or online help, but mostly alert boxes stating that I am not connected to the internet ( which of coarse i am permanently through glassfiber notably! ) or that help is not installed and that I should reinstall the program ( which I tried several times with no result at all ).
The only button in these alert boxes that one can click is an irritating OK button.
In these cases it would be normal is ther was also a button : “I will fix it for you” or something similar.
The fact that a simple thing as a helpsystem is totally out of reach for Adobe programmers, gives me the feeling that they are completely incompetent and that probably there is a lot more wrong under the hood of every Adobe program.
It is now januari 2013 and I have read similar complaints way back in june 2013, so after all this time they are still unable te fix this. Or are they unwilling?
Bottomline: never buy anything Adobe anymore!!!
Bob, the issue you seem to have is with ntuser.dat, I have the same issue with someone at work. Problem is removing ntuser.dat will break the users profile and her precious iTunes. :-(
Thanks for finbally writing about >InDesign CS6 Help PDF Posted
But the Content Is a Mess – InDesignSecrets : InDesignSecrets <Loved it!
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