The Mystery of the Missing Frames Contest Answer and Winner!
It’s time to reveal the solution (and prize winners) for this month’s InDesignSecrets contest!
This time, the mystery involved some frames that were present in the layout, but were invisible. In the screenshot below, we’re looking at page where there are three frames (as shown in the Layers panel). But only one frame is in view.
As stated in the original post, nothing was hidden, Show Edges was enabled, etc.
So what gives?
The answer we were looking for was Overprint Preview (or Separations Preview). When you have these enabled, frames that won’t appear in printed output disappear—unless you select them. Since the unselected frames had no stroke and no fill, they vanished when Overprint Preview was turned on. Note that this is different from the Preview mode that you can enter by choosing View > Screen Mode > Preview (or by pressing W with nothing selected). In that case, you wouldn’t see the page margins like you do in the screenshot.
Several folks also came up with a clever solution that we hadn’t considered: that the visible frame had a Paper fill, and the other two frames were precisely positioned underneath it. While this wasn’t what we had in mind, it can in fact yield the exact look you see in the screenshot. So in fairness to those folks, I counted their entries as correct.
OK, now for the winner (chosen at random from the correct entries):
Erica Plante
Congratulations, Erica! You win a 2-seat license for the amazing in5 from Ajar Productions!
Thanks again to everyone who entered for taking the time to participate. Keep those emails coming! Next month, we’ll have another fun contest with a brand new prize.
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when Overprint Preview is disabled, frames can be same size as the page or as margins area, and only selected frame is in view.
tomas: One of the frames was an empty graphic frame, though, so you would see the big “X” in it if it were as big as the page.
That told him!
Oh man! I was stumped on the answer for this. Interestingly, another issue with Overprint Preview is that it also hides hidden characters, even in Normal Mode. I even wrote a blog post about it some time back: https://creativepro.com/where-did-my-hidden-characters-go.php
My solution is different:
one text frame is visible and selected (the one on the screenshot)
The other text frame is the primary text frame that is created on new page and it is over the purple lines of the margin.
The rectangle is a frame without border and fill and also has the same dimension and position over the margin (purple lines).
This time also my luck fails….! I’m waiting for next contest!
Congrats Erica! :)