A question from Scott Russell led us to discover an interesting difference between CS3 and CS4: An old trick for making one or more corners rounded no longer works in the newest version. I first heard of this trick from Sandee Cohen at a conference, and the fact that it worked both amazed me and made me nervious. It made me nervous because it just shouldn’t work; it seemed like a bug to me, so it’s not entirely surprising that in CS4 it no longer appears to work.
The trick was this: Draw a rectangle and apply rounded corners with it (with Object > Corner Options). Now switch to the Pen tool and click on the path near a corner. Finally, switch to the Direct Selection tool and drag that new point over the existing corner point. The rounded corner suddenly “pops” back to a sharp corner.
It’s amazing that it worked, and it helped a lot of people make frames with some rounded and some non-rounded corners. But why would InDesign do that? I never understood how it worked, so I was wary of it. Now, with CS4, it doesn’t work anymore… Actually, it’s even stranger: When you drag the new point over the corner point, all the points on the path turn to corner points. That makes even less sense to me.
What’s worse, documents created with this trick in CS3 and earlier also “break” when opened in CS4, causing documents to appear very different!
Maybe it’s a bug in CS4. Or maybe it was a bug in CS3. I don’t know.
So what’s to be done? Use the cornereffects script to make individually-rounded corners instead. It’s easy, it’s free, and you already have it (though you might not know you do).
This article was last modified on December 19, 2021
This article was first published on April 13, 2009
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