LiveDocs Help Pages Come to InDesign CS3
About a month ago I wrote here about some powerful new Help features in InDesign CS3. The InDesign Help files which we usually reach by choosing Help > InDesign Help are now also found as web pages which can be accessed on the Internet. When Adobe Help Viewer 1.1 launches, you can get to them by clicking the This page on the Web link. These pages can be searched for on the Internet. The web pages will be updated and added to in the future, presumably fixing the inevitable errors which creep into documentation which is written as the software is being engineered.
But now these web Help pages are enhanced to allow commenting. (Thanks to Tim Cole’s excellent blog for this information!) This feature was first introduced with the Photoshop Help web pages, and some of those have now been commented on, adding further information about the subject. At the bottom of each web Help page, you’ll see the Add Comment button.
Another advantage of the LiveDocs Help feature is that the current page has a URL (shown above the Add Comment button), which you can use as a reference when sending help information to other people. This is very difficult to do using Adobe’s Help Viewer.
Cool! I’ve already submitted a comment to the page on exporting XHTML (correcting an error in the help file). Let’s see if I can get my 15 minutes of fame.
They say all the comments are reviewed and if they pass muster, are posted within 24 hours.
Well, I guess the bit about 24 hours was more of a CYA thing…
my docs comment
Thanks, Anne-Marie. That’s very nice! It will now be much easier to cross-reference the Help files within our blog posts now.
Damn!
I had to listen to the mention of LiveDocs in the podcast and then read this message from Steve before I understood the amazing power of what LiveDocs means.
Shades of Wikipedia, this makes the entire Help system for all Adobe applications have the potential for incredible information.
Should I be worried about my book sales? I don’t think so.
But I just submitted an added bit of information for one of the General Preferences settings.
http://livedocs.adobe.com/en_US/InDesign/5.0/help.html?content=WSa285fff53dea4f8617383751001ea8cb3f-6d1f.html
And it was just approved. (And they even let me keep my subtle plug for my book.)
The only thing I fault Adobe for in doing LiveDocs is they aren’t PUBLICIZING them well enough.
LiveDocs is a fantastic resource and makes it more appealing that Adobe hasn’t shipped big, thick user manuals with the software.
Sandee, I don’t think you should be worred about your book sales. In fact, we want to promote excellent third-party books in the help system by linking to or even including helpful content. I’ll be contacting you and others about making LiveDocs Help more of a community effort.
have been using cs2 for a few years, and my chief gripe is that my indesign help pulldown displays only photoshop help.
trying to teach myself the software is especially hard when the help doesn’t.
any ideas?
Hi there,
Im using Indesign to create a brochure and inputting data into it from Excel using an XML input.
When ever i input a number, even if it is formatted as text in Excel, it adds a decimal place!
Is there any way of avoiding this???
Would appreciate any advice,
many thanks,
Gabriel
Printing error when i print on tabloid size paper, it enlarges document. This does not happen when i print out in other applications, only indesign. Any ideas?
How do I make the pasteboard in an Indesign dokument smaller?
@Ninja: See this post for pasteboard problems.
@Debra: That is often a printer driver problem. Make sure Scale to Fit is off in the Print dialog box, of course. Also, you can click the Printer button (or Setup) in the Print dialog box to see the printer driver features.
We have a pamphlet of 40 pages A5 printed on 10 pages of A4 landscape. It was keyed in straight through, and now we have to sort the pages so when they are turned over they are in the correcty place. We can do this, but can find no way of getting these numbered automatically, thoough we have searched the InDesign Classroom in a Book as I know that this is something which InDesign can cope with.
Help would be hugely appreciated.
@Diana: This question is probably better asked in the forum (click Forums, above). I’m not sure exactly what you mean, but I’m thinking you may need the booklet feature… choose File > Print Booklet. Or do a search on this site for “imposition.”