David (no, not me!) wrote:
Both my Text Wrap and Pathfinder windows are blank in InDesign. Did I change a setting or do something else stupid? Do I need to reinstall?
I don’t know what’s in the air these days, but we’ve been getting a bunch of these kinds of emails recently… empty panels, empty palettes, whatever you want to call them. You’re on deadline, it’s Friday morning, you wake up from your well-deserved 3 hours of sleep since you shut the computer down, and you launch InDesign… why is the Links panel empty? Why are there no colors in the Swatches panel? What is going on?
The answer is simple: I don’t know.
But I do know that it happens sometimes — this mysterious “empty palette syndrome” — and I know a solution that almost always fixes it: Rebuild your preferences. Anne-Marie first wrote about how to do this way back in 2006 (but it works in CS3 and CS4, too).
By the way, the Rebuild Your Preferences trick is one of several troubleshooting techniques listed on this Popular Posts page. And, just for references, if you need to find it again, choose InDesign FAQ from the Resources drop-down menu at the top of this page.
So next time you find yourself staring at a blank panel, quit, relaunch, and if the problem doesn’t go away, then quit again, and rebuild your prefs upon startup.
(Of course, note that when you do this, you lose all your application preferences. That could be a hassle, but less so than having a blank palette!)
This article was last modified on December 19, 2021
This article was first published on April 27, 2009
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