Dear Adobe // Blog

Not to be out done by his compatriots, Michael Ninness, Senior Product Manager for InDesign, took some time to respond to the gripes listed here on Dear Adobe.  He’s sent along alot of tips and workarounds for some common problems and even addresses the dreaded Cmd+H / Leopard issue.

In other Dear Adobe/InDesign news, we’ve also earned some fans in the InDesign QA department.  James Roche writes in:

As much as I can vouch for the InDesign team, we follow up on each piece of customer feedback that we see, so this is a great central location for collecting and scoring frustrations in our user ranks. Thanks!

So, InDesign fans, read on to see what the future may hold for your layout program of choice and maybe learn something you didn’t know.

1.) Why is the color picker different in all the CS apps? Why can’t I use an eyedropper in the color picker in InDesign? #146

Adobe: Short answer is because they were all implemented at different times by separate teams. If only we could copy and paste code between the apps! This is the kind of stuff we are trying to change. Good feature request for an eyedropper in the InDesign color picker. Illustrator needs one as well.

2.) Please give us color management for grayscale images in InDesign. It’s a huge pain without. Direct RGB to grayscale conversion without a trip to Photoshop would also be very useful. #984

Adobe: I hear you. We are at least exploring RGB to grayscale when exporting to PDF for CS5.

3.) Please give us an option to “Save all user defined settings” to a USB-memory stick (Preferences, workspaces, actions, presets, profiles, custom brushes, custom patterns, etc.). And a way to load those whenever you want. #1163

Adobe: Great idea. And a way to push those to multiple computers in multi-user environments.

4.) InDesign should be able to make PDF forms directly. #1334

Adobe: I agree. While this isn’t what you are asking for, using the form fields recognition feature in Acrobat 8 and higher does ease the pain somewhat. Here is a link to a useful post over at InDesignSecrets.com about this process: http://indesignsecrets.com/automated-forms-with-acrobat-8-and-indesign.php

5.) Why doesn’t InDesign respond to “Cmd+H”? Why can’t I hide InDesign on Leopard? Why can’t I switch back to InDesign after I’ve hidden it on Leopard? #212, #1258, #1726, #2140

Adobe: These are all valid (and related) gripes, and we continue to work with Apple to try to resolve them. Adobe knows it’s painful. Apple knows it’s painful. Please know that we are not ignoring this issue; we want it fixed as well, as it is both embarrassing and frustrating! For now, if Cmd+H stops working for you, you’ll need to force quit InDesign and relaunch. (If you had any InDesign documents open before having to force quit, your “session” should be restored for you when you relaunch InDesign.) From that point on, Cmd+H should work properly until the next time you restart your Mac.

6.) Can you imagine what we have to go through if we have to reorder rows in an InDesign table?! Can you? I mean it even works in MS Word! #1738

Adobe: Yes, it is painful. We made some progress with improving Table editing in CS4 by finally letting you see the table text content in the Story Editor. That at least makes it possible to edit overset text in table cells. Obviously, we’ve still got some work to do on reordering (and sorting) table rows and columns.

7.) InDesign just deleted (not moved to the Trash, just deleted!) all my links because I tried to replace a packaged file with a new version of itself. I bill by the hour, so thanks! #832

Adobe: There isn’t enough info in this gripe for me to fully understand what was going on, and what to suggest. I can say that we’ve significantly improved the entire Links functionality in CS4 (It was a complete rearchitecture). I’m hoping these improvements help whoever submitted this gripe.

8.) Why doesn’t InDesign recognize sub-layers when placing Illustrator files? Cause, man, it should. #1435

Adobe: It’s a personal pet peeve of mine as well, and it is high on my list to address in CS5. That would let me change the stacking order and visibility of objects, and let me rename and lock/unlock them all from the Layers panel. I’m thinking that would make a lot of people happy.

9.) A scrubber bar for font size in InDesign would be very welcomed! Why is it in Photoshop but not InDesign? Crazy! #1147

Adobe: For now, in pretty much all the CS apps, you can invoke a “virtual” scrubby slider for any text edit field. Either click into the field, or click on the label next to the field to select the entire contents of that field. Then, you can use your up and down arrow keys to change the values; hold down the Shift key as well to increase the jump values. Press the Enter key when you are done.

10.) InDesign needs to work for left-handers too. Let Alt bring up the scroll hand too! #1082

Adobe: Either Alt key should give you the Hand tool when you are editing text. The Spacebar gives you the Hand tool when you are not using the Text tool.

11.) Could you, please, make InDesign work properly with OS X Leopard? #1701

Adobe: I’m guessing this gripe has to do with issues beyond the Cmd+H gripes. The Mac OS X 10.5.4 update has resolved a number of issues when running InDesign on Leopard. Check out Tim Cole’s blog on this topic for more details: http://blogs.adobe.com/indesignchannel/2008/06/indesign_leopard_1054_nav_serv.html

12.) Please reconsider FrameMaker for Mac: meaning write something for Mac that a technical writer of long documents can USE. Not InDesign, it’s shit for long technical documents. #1902

Adobe: No Macintosh version of FrameMaker has been frustrating for some. We’ve gradually been increasing the InDesign long document features and capabilities version over version. In CS4, InDesign has added Cross References and Conditional Text.

13.) InDesign text columns controlled in a paragraph style! Saves me time clipping text and making frames. That’ll be all for now. #373

Adobe: You can change the number of columns in a text frame by choosing Object > Text Frame Options, or pressing (Cmd+B) [Ctrl+B]. For bonus points, you can include the number of columns when defining an Object Style. Also, Object Styles can include Paragraph Styles in them as well.

14.) I would like to copy from InDesign and paste into Illustrator, instead of saving out an EPS, placing and embedding it, then deleting the EPS I had to make. #2124

Adobe: You can copy and paste from Illustrator into InDesign, or from InDesign to Illustrator; no need to save an EPS from AI or ID first. In version CS3 and higher, the clipboard preferences for each application need to be set to “prefer PDF”. To check your prefs in each app, press (Cmd+K) [Ctrl+K], then choose the respective “clipboard” section. For Illustrator, turn on “Copy as PDF” and for InDesign, turn on “Prefer PDF When Pasting” and “Copy PDF to Clipboard”.

15.) If you want to relink an image, could it please be possible to get straight to the folder in which the original image sits? It was possible in other versions, but not anymore. #4025

Adobe: Fixed in CS4, and you now have a choice. Press (Cmd+K) [Ctrl+K], to open up Preferences, and click on the File Handling section. At the bottom of the dialog, you can choose an option for the “Default Relink Folder” option. Your choices are “Original Relink Folder” or  “Most Recent Relink Folder”.

16.) Embedding an AI file in InDesign and then changing the layer order or layer naming in Illustrator will ruin the linkage of all the embedded Illustrator data in InDesign. Thus the Object Layer Options Dialog becomes unusable! Please fix this!!!! #1074

Adobe: You can get the behavior you want by changing the Object Layer Options for the AI file you’ve placed in InDesign. By default, InDesign honors any local layer overrides you’ve made within InDesign via the Object Layer Options dialog. To honor the changes you make to the file in Illustrator instead, selected the placed AI file, right-click on it and choose “Object Layer Options…” Then change the “When Updating Link” pop-up menu from “Keep Layer Visibility Overrides” to “Use PDF’s Layer Visibility”.

17.) InDesign Character/Paragraph styles are a mess. Allow me to apply more than one style to a bit of text. Also, external (linked, centralized) style sheets with directly editable code. Ideally, move everything to an extended/customized CSS based system. #1344

Adobe: Linking to an external style sheet sounds like an interesting feature request. I could see how that would be powerful, but could also potentially cause unintended results for some when updating the external style sheet. This isn’t exactly what you are asking for, but you can synchronize style sheets across multiple InDesign documents when using the Book feature.

18.) Please let me choose CMYK or RGB mode in when creating a new document (New Document window) and choose or change it in the Document Setup window. And when I’m in CMYK mode, for the love of god, let black be true black! Rich black is not as popular as your InDesign and Illustrator teams seem to think it is! #2710

Adobe: Amen! If you choose RGB, have the Color panel switch to RGB sliders automatically, have the Proof Set up change to an sRGB profile, and change the Transparency Blend Space to Document RGB. How about we throw in pixels as a measurement system while we are at it? Hmm… this would really make it easier to set up a document that is going to be published to a digital format rather than be printed. Crossing my fingers for CS5.