We’ve now had three updates to InDesign CS4, so we’re now up to InDesign CS4 6.0.3, but there are still little bugs which are ruining some people’s workflows. A couple of helpful Adobe employees have posted updates on the Adobe InDesign Forum about two of them.
PDFs Placed into CS4 Documents May Drop Characters When Exported to PDF.
Bob Levine reported this bug in a posting in May. In short:
If you’ve placed PDFs created by Quark 7 or earlier or distilled using Distiller 8 or earlier, some characters in those PDFs may be dropped when viewing or Printing the PDF from Acrobat or Reader version 8 and earlier. Adobe has recently acknowledged this problem and issued a technote on it.
Dov Isaacs, Adobe Principal Scientist, and Matthew Laun, and InDesign engineer reported this week that the fix for this didn’t make it into 6.0.3, but is expected before long:
Help is definitely on the way. The fix for this involves two components, both of which have great complexity, so it has required some significant code review and testing before we have confidence to release it. We had a tough decision with 6.0.3, in which we had some fixes we wanted to get out quickly, but feared rushing the work on this critical issue could result in additional defects.
There are a couple of workarounds listed in Bob’s posting.
CS4 Data Merge Outputs Placeholders, Blank Lines
Matthew Laun has also been on the case of reports from the InDesign Forum about placeholders in the Data Merge feature not being properly replaced with merge data, or with extra blank lines.
He also reported this week:
I have good news, and bad news. The bad news first. We’ve not been able to find a workaround to the problem where the placeholder objects are not replaced by strings from the data source. The code uses a reference which it assumed could not have multiple instances, when in fact some documents do produce multiple instances. A solution has been tested which uses a new method to ensure that a unique reference is always generated for each placeholder object. The good news. While I can’t make any promises about if or when a fix will be made available, the issue is being considered for an out of schedule update.
He suggests in the forum thread that if you submit a bug report, and report how this is affecting your workflow, that that will impact how fast it gets fixed. The only workaround appears to be to use InDesign CS3 for Data Merge.
This article was last modified on December 19, 2021
This article was first published on August 4, 2009
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