Two more CS4 Bugs: The Reluctant Book Panel & Swatches By Name
Let’s see, so far I have posted about my dislike for the Gradient panel, the spell checker, and a nasty bug. Please believe me that I do love working with this application. Well, if you’ve seen the movie, you know that. I’m just on a roll, I guess. So here’s two more buggy bits to be aware of in CS4 (both are just annoying, not deal-breakers, like the master page items bug, imho).
Book Panel Blindness
On the Mac, when you have a free-floating document window, you are supposed to be able to drag the icon from the document title bar into a Book panel to add that document to the Book. But in CS4, the Book panel doesn’t always seem to be aware of this.
Try it: create a new document and save it. Create a new Book. Try to drag the document’s title bar icon into the Book. No response, right? Here’s the weird workaround: drag the document window down on your screen until it is below the Book panel. Now drag the title bar icon. It goes into the Book as expected. Apparently, you have to go in thru the back door. Going in from any other direction won’t work.
One other thing: if you remove the document from the book, you can add it back in by dragging regardless of where the document is onscreen. It seems to “remember” which books it has been a part of. But you still cannot add that document to other books without positioning it beneath them.
Swatch Panel Out of Focus
There have been a couple of posts here at InDesignSecrets about the fun of selecting swatches from the keyboard: one by me, and one by Anne-Marie.
Too bad it doesn’t work in CS4. You can still use the arrow keys to navigate swatches when the list has focus, but typing the letters of a swatch name won’t select it. Also, the little visual cue, the black line around the swatch list is gone.
Yep, just call me Mr. Sunshine ; )
In case folks missed the post, Anne-Marie also posted links to some CS4 tech notes about bugs Adobe already knows about. (I just wanted to post that here, to make sure there’s a link from this post to that one.)
Hold the presses! I just figured something out as I was looking at my screenshots.
On the Book panel thing, you don’t have to drag from beneath, you just can’t have the Book panel and the document window overlap.
If you arrange things so the Book panel and the document window don’t touch, the document goes into the Book from any direction. That makes a little more sense. Still not good, but not as weird as before.
Gotta go revise my bug report.
I purchased CS4 Design Premium last week and am stunned with how many bugs there are. Today I discovered that the Pen tool does NOT EVEN work in Illustrator correctly when using Smart Guides and Constrained angles. (The “tech assistance” people at Adobe weren’t aware of this fundamental problem until I taught them what a Constrain angle is!)
I WOULD UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES PURCHASE CS4. IT WILL ONLY CAUSE YOU PROBLEMS. TRUST ME, IM A DESIGNER WITH OVER 20 YEARS OF EXPERIENCE.
Kevin,
AICS4 Help states clearly that the Constrain Angle does not apply to drawings with the Pencil Tool and Live Trace tool, it should also add the Pen tool.
And the Pen tool is also unaware of Smart Guide angles different to 0 or 90 degrees.
Maybe they will add this in the future as Smart Guides loolks like a work in progress.
Personally I will not request it as feature for a next revision.
Several of the CS4 applications (ID, AI) may have come with some new bugs, but several, so called, bugs from CS3 have been already fixed
No. This feature works properly in CS3. It is a serious flaw in CS4.
How about these bugs in InDesign CS4:
1)
Smart Guides
If you have several objects on your page, and drag – let’s say a grafik box – and holding the SHIFT-key down while dragging, the smart guide will take control over your SHIFT-drag and will NOT drag in a strait move!
2)
Changing textframes
I found that sometimes when I want a textframe to be smaller, and am using the selection tool to make – lets say the bottom less tall – the textframe would change and be wider???
3)
Placed graphic
When I’m making screendumps by copying to the clipboard and placing them directly on a page, the colors change mysterious. A zoom in and out again solves the problem.
4)
Text Wrap
When I’m working with text wrap on a picture, the text wrap will do so, but changing the target from the container to the content. So one will get confused: Is the text wrap now on the container or the content ???
5)
Drag a copy
Yet another error: If you hold the ALT-key (Option) down while dragging an object (to make a copy), and the object has some objectstyle applied, the styling will be deleted. The same happens when you drag a textframe with eg. a paragraphstyle applied – the styling will go away ?
6)
Exporting a book as a pdf-file from the book panel
I just took my 19 chapters and converted them to CS4 from CS3 – no problem. BUT ? When I then export all the chapters within the book, everything goes wrong. The book panel did export until the very last page was generated. The the whole application then quited!!! OK, I then tried to remove the last chapter (since it seemed to be the document that had an error). But now the book panel did the same error, and quited the app. after the new last page was generated. Removing the chapters one by one didn’t solve the problem.
So I did an export from each chapter (document) instead, taking a very long time. Now the pdf’s could be putted together in Acrobat. BUT: Now all the frontpages from ALL the chapters disapears. Both colors and text, and it even displayed some of the pages (inside the chapters) with som replaced fonts, telling that Myriad Pro has an error. What is going one?????
The solution was to make INX files from CS4 back to CS3 and then do the whole exporting once again – this time with NO ERROR AT ALL ? My god !!!
– Kenn
Has anyone else had this problem in InDesign CS4…
The landscape page orientation looks correct on the print window, but when it is printed to my imagesetter the page is reversed horizontally & vertically. This only happens for landscape pages on my Mac. It is correct on my PC. Anyone else have this problem? Is there a fix for it?
Thanks,
Jim
I have a problem with indesign CS4 too,
don’t know if i am doing something wrong
but when i convert to PDF, i am missing my background images of every page… the first one appears half and the rest is just… no where!
i used a gradient filter on them
so probably it’s something with gradient filter and export to PDF?
James Gura –
I’m having the exact same problem. I just called Adobe, and they said it is a known bug, and should be corrected “soon”.
Has Adobe admitted to Indesign CS4 having problems.
When I send an Indd file to a Fiery server (level 3 ps) the file prints out blank. Nothing on the paper! If I send the same file from a pc, it is fine. I am going crazy!
When preflighting from book panel I get black circle ? marks on all idcs4 files though the report gives me the correct path for all doc.
black circle ? marks mean “No preflight information available.”
i’m also having a small annoyance with indesgn cs4
after zooming (Alt+Scroll) the menu stays active so i have to press Alt again to be able to dot anything
i would like it to work as in cs3 or illustrator cs4
is there maybe a setting? or a fix?
I have the same not so small annoyance with InDesign CS4 as Botond Fazakas noticed. Not so small because I use Alt+Scroll quite often, maybe hundreds a day.
This misbehavior is also present in Photoshp CS4.
I’m on Windows 7 Ultimate edition, if that matters for a possible solution…
Hi folks
I think I have found a bug concerning text anchors with buttons.
Text anchors which link to text with apostrophies or quotation marks in it will not work. Other special characters like brackets, commas, line breaks don’t seem to be a problem.
The workaround is quite simple of course, just highlight text without the mentioned characters when creating the anchor. Just a thing to be aware of…