*** From the Archives ***
This article is from October 19, 2007, and is no longer current.
What happened to my Bridge?
It wasn’t bad, but suddenly in the middle of my all-day tutorial at the Creative Suite Conference, the previews for my Adobe Swatch Exchange files changed from file icons into swatch previews.
For instance, this is an ASE icon I have from earlier that day.
This is an ASE icon I have from earlier in the week:
But this is the preview, in Bridge, from an ASE file I created after the middle of the class.
That icon is showing a preview of each of the swatches in the ASE file.
So here are my questions:
First, why are there two different colors and icons for the swatch file? I figure the green one has something to do with Creative Suite 2 as it uses the leaf motif from that version of the suite.
I guess the purple one is from CS3. But I can’t be sure that the swatches came from ID. Would another icon from PSD or AI be blue or orange? (I can’t test this as I can no longer make any of those types of icons.
Finally, what did I do to get those really cool swatch icons? I love them! But I would like to know what I did to get them.
 |
Not that any of this helps any but I just checked the CS2 and CS3 icon choices on Windows and unless I’m missing something I can’t even find that first one.
The second one is the only ASE icon I can find as a choice from ID, Illy, or PS in CS2 or CS3.
The Bridge preview is the actual collection of swatches and is the same behavior I’m seeing.
Have you tried purging the cache to see if the preview icon persists?
As for Bob not ever seeing the first icon, it may be different on Windows, but on Mac that is the icon for Swatch Exchange files in CS3.
I wonder if that’s not part of the mystery. I just doublechecked and I can’t find that icon anywhere.
It certainly has an InDesign color scheme. I wonder if these files were ever on a Windows system.
The first purple one is what the Mac Finder shows for InDesign CS3 swatch files. The second CS2 like one is what Illustrator CS3 swatch files look like in the Mac Finder (guess they missed updating that one huh?). In the Bridge I am getting previews like the 3rd one (showing actually swatches) for both the InDesign and Illustrator swatch files. Why the first two showed up like that in the Bridge is a mystery. Maybe their previews hadn’t been cached yet? I actually had never looked at swatch files in the Bridge before. I think it’s pretty cool that it previews them!
It appears that Bridge CS3 can read .ase format. However it’s a little patchy- it doesn’t know where to break the “lines” when the colors are grouped into sets or 3 or 4. Also, no matter how big you make your Preview Panel, the .ase preview stops at a maximum size. Last complaint: shouldn’t .ase files default to opening in InDesign? It ought to launch ID, then ask if you wish to import the Swatches into the current document.