LAYOUT : the newsletter of page design

A bug has come to light in Adobe InDesign CS3 that affects the generation of indexes for Books. A Book is a collection of InDesign documents (typically representing individual chapters) that share common attributes such as consecutive automatic page numbering, a table of contents and an index. Unfortunately, users have noted that the index generated by CS3 from a Book tends to miss out certain words and phrases, even though they might be clearly listed and referenced in the Index palette.
The following link takes you to an Adobe forum where this has been discussed at some length, and includes a workaround involving running a free script (from Olav Kvern, no less) to combine your Book into a single InDesign document so that the index can be generated correctly.
www.adobeforums.com/cgi-bin/webx/.3bc3c645?14

Don’t you wish that Adobe or Quark could come up with a text feature that drew underlines (underscores) that break at descenders instead of crashing straight through them? Join the queue. In the meantime, here’s a workaround that you can try using Adobe InDesign.

Draw a text frame, type in some text and select it. Give the text an underline by clicking on the Underline button () in the Character formatting options mode of the Control palette. If the text has lower-case descenders, the underline moronically runs straight through them like this:

Right, here’s my cheat. With the text selected, switch the colour focus to Stroke in the Tools palette.

Then click on the Paper colour in the Swatches palette. Your text now has an outline that is effectively invisible on a non-coloured plain background.

Finally increase the weight of the stroke using the Stroke palette. My underline is for a headline style, so it’s quite thick.

With some luck, your underlined text now looks like this:

You may need to push the underline downwards to stop the text’s Paper stroke from eating into its top edge. To do this, Alt+click on the Underline button in the Control palette to open the Underline Options dialogue window, and increase the Offset value.

The advantages of this trick are (1) it is completely customisable, and (2) you can use it as part of a character style because the text remains editable, like so:

The disadvantages of this trick are (1) the settings may need a lot of tweaking to stop the underline peeking through the counter of the letter ‘g’, and (2) the stroke colour must be the same as the colour behind the text — you can’t use it in front of graphics or gradients.

One of the causes of Adobe InDesign CS3 or InCopy CS3 crashing under Mac OS X with a message saying ‘The application has unexpectedly quit’ may be a corrupted font cache. Adobe programs rely on a cache file named Adobefnt10.lst to speed up the loading of fonts; if this file gets corrupted, it can cause InDesign and InCopy to bomb out during launch. To fix this, search for the cache file by name using the Find command or Spotlight, then delete it. Now launch InDesign or InCopy, and a new font cache file will be generated, hopefully clearing the problem.

Just a note for those of you preparing layout templates in Adobe InDesign CS2… The program’s Object Styles do not let you set up a default set of attributes for picture boxes (otherwise known as ‘Rectangle/Ellipse/Polygon Frames‘). Very confusingly, the [Basic Graphics Frame] default Object Style actually applies to boxes drawn with the plain shape tools (’Rectangle/Ellipse/Polygon’ without the cross-through inside). No matter what formatting you customise in the [Basic Graphics Frame] Object Style, none of it will apply to picture boxes, only to plain (non-graphic) shapes.
To set up a custom default for picture boxes, make sure nothing is selected on the page (or close all pages in order to set up an application-wide default), click on the Rectangle/Ellipse/Polygon Frame tool in the Tools palette as required, then make your formatting changes in the Swatches palette, Stroke palette and so on. Now every new picture box you draw will be formatted appropriately.
If you want to set up more than one type of default picture box, well you can’t — defaults come in singles, that’s what a ‘default’ means. To create two or more alternative formatting ‘defaults’ for picture boxes, create them as Object Styles.

[Alistair writes:] I had a problem installing Adobe Creative Suite 3 Web Edition on a new PC at the weekend. After an extremely long installation process the installer appeared to finish but then flashed up a message saying: “Licensing for this product has stopped working. You cannot use this product at this time. You must repair the problem by uninstalling and then reinstalling this product…” At first, I thought it was my own fault for trying to put CS3 on a Vista machine, but Adobe recognises this installer message as an issue and has posted a CS3 installer troubleshooting guide on its support website. However, if the troubleshooting advice looks challenging, do what I did: follow the recommendation of the original message by uninstalling and then reinstalling. It worked for me.

In response to user demand, Adobe has published a tech note explaining how to disable the prominent Fedex-Kinko’s Print Service button and its related menu command from Acrobat and Adobe Reader. The feature was installed automatically with the version 8.1 update, leading to a howl of complaint from printers in North America, and much bafflement in the UK where the feature doesn’t work anyway. The removal process involves manually editing your Windows registry and changing preference keys in Mac OS X — not for the faint-hearted.
http://kb.adobe.com/selfservice/viewContent.do?externalId=kb401726&sliceId=2

To customise how text and graphics are formatted when brought onto an Adobe InDesign page, you need to tick the Show Import Options item in the File > Place dialogue window before clicking OK. This calls up the relevant Import Options dialogue window. However, doing so leaves Show Import Options ticked by default, and this can be annoying later on if you forget to untick it when subsequently placing other text and graphics, as it causes an Import Options window to appear every time whether you want it to or not.

To get around this, don’t tick the Show Import Options item in the first place. Instead, once you have selected a file in the Place dialogue window, hold down the Shift key as you click OK. This causes the Import Options dialogue window to appear just for this action, but it won’t automatically appear next time you place something. Given that most of the time you will be placing text and graphics without customisation, it makes sense to leave Show Import Options unticked by default.

Some people have experienced a curious pop-up message when opening a PDF created with Adobe InDesign CS2 or CS3 that says: “Please fill out the following form. If you are a form author, choose Distribute Form in Forms menu to send it to your recipients.” The problem is the result of placing a stroked object within 1/8 inch (3mm) above a hyperlink in the InDesign layout and exporting it to Adobe PDF with the Interactive Elements option enabled.
There are two workarounds. You can either ensure that all strokes are more than 1/8 inch above any hyperlinks in the layout, or disable the Interactive Elements option when exporting to Adobe PDF.

Sometimes QuarkXPress 7.2 (and version 7.1 before it) fails to display any layers in the Layers palette if you launch the program by double-clicking on a QuarkXPress project file. The program launches and the file opens without any apparent problem, but the Layers palette remains blank.
There’s no need to quit QuarkXPress and try again. Simply closing the project and immediately re-opening it clears the problem, forcing the Layers palette to display its contents correctly. Alternatively, get into the habit of launching QuarkXPress from its program icon (or shortcut) first, and only then double-clicking on project files to open them.