*** From the Archives ***
This article is from July 11, 2006, and is no longer current.
InDesign Gripe of the Moment: Extra Space When Pasting
When I was a kid, I had a little “inspirational” poster in my bedroom of the Peanuts cartoon strip’s Lucy saying, “It’s better to bitch, moan, and complain than never to have bitched, moaned, and complained at all.” (I’m not making this up.) With that in mind, I hereby institute the official InDesignSecrets Gripe of the Moment (IDSGOM).
Copy a paragraph. Place cursor in front of some other paragraph. Paste. Paragraph appears… and InDesign inserts a space in front of the next paragraph. [Insert painful groan like the cries of a weary traveller who just can’t get that pebble out of his shoe.] The solution? Press Delete to remove the space. But after over a year of pressing delete each time I paste a paragraph, and after upgrading to InDesign 4.01, 4.02, and 4.03… well, a guy just gets tired. So tired. So very, very tired.
Please. Adobe. Give us 4.04, and give us peace. Stop the madness. Thank you. This has been the IDSGOM.
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Each time a TOC is updated, ID adds an extra carriage return at the end of it. Very annoying because my TOCs are centered vertically in the middle of the page.
Agreed bu I submit another one for future consideration: the what page will InDesign show this time feature. ID has a phenomenal ability to show the other side of any given spread when you fit-page-in-window, regardless of where you cursor is or what page you’ve selected in the page number palette.
Turning off the ‘Adjust Spacing Automatically When Cutting and Pasting Words’ option in the Preferences dialog (Preferences > Type) should cure what ails you.
Chad, FIXING the fault, a BUG in thinking, is what cures this ailment.
Now, now, Chad… don’t make me come over there! [Ed note: Chad is a bigwig on the InDesign team, so I’m allowed to give him a little extra grief.] Chad’s suggestion is a good one, as long as I don’t mind cutting off one foot to save the other. When that preference is turned off and you select and delete a word in the middle of a sentence, InDesign leaves two spaces in the middle of the sentence.
Anne-Marie pointed out another solution: Drag and drop. If you turn on Enable Drag and Drop in the Type panel of the Preferences dialog box, you can drag a paragraph from one place to another and you won’t get this annoying added space. Don’t forget you can drag and drop from one text frame to another — not only within a single frame.
Remember…if everything was perfect with our software, we’d have no reason to upgrade. At least that’s what I learned while working for Microsoft. (Or maybe that’s how we rationalized the bugs.) ;)
Indesign has problems dealing with long words containing the plus sign or the equal sign. I’m typesetting a medical book and they’ve got these combination drugs that have plus signs (and no space) in them.
When these words run over to the next line, Indesign goes,”Hey, is this a word? Anyway, I’m going just break it here, like after the first three alphabets of the word. And you know what, since I don’t recognize to be a word, therefore it’s not a word, and I will not insert a hyphen.”
This doesn’t annoy me so much anymore, because we have moved away from eps, but it used to drive me nuts.
CS2 has extremely slow savetimes with eps images (we used them because of Quark) placed from a network server (at least in windows). If you place lets say 50 images from a server, you could have to wait a couple of minutes for document save. CS does this in seconds, so does CS2 with jpg or tif. Even a few placed eps files slow the saves concideraply.
Other not so favorite “feature”: CS2 sometimes loses links to images, it says that the originals are missign even if they are where they should be.
I always have this problem with mapping styles when placing text in InDesign. Even though I’ve specified which InDesign style I would like to use, the transition isn’t smooth. I’m sure there’s a way around it, or that I’m doing something wrong. Can any one help?
There is another silly ID-“feature” regarding blanks: Have a paragraph start, say with a bullet, followed by an half or two fourth spaces, whatever. You want to repeat this (listing). You copy carriage return, bullet and the special space(s). You end a paragraph, you are pasting, hoping that you can continue with writing right away. What happens? Carriage return and bullet – fine. But the extra space: missing. ID deletes spaces pasted at the end of a text. Faulty programming because of faulty thinking! Have a look into QuarkXPress 3.x: XPress is also handling spaces via cutting and pasting in the necessary intelligent manner as ID – but is very conscious about spaces at the end of text: These are never deleted automatically!
Why is data merge such a problem (costly plug-ins) with InDesign. Pagemaker and Word have no such issues. Whine…
(Random Griping)
I’m not sure what you mean by “costly plug-ins.” There is a Data Merge feature built-in to InDesign CS2. (See the last issue of InDesign Magazine.) It is only if you need more features that you would need plug-ins such as Em Software’s InData or Teacup Software’s DataLinker.
Why does editing in InDesign have to be such a pain? Recently, I’ve resorted to saving a book as a pdf and proofing it with (Mac) Preview. I then jump back into InDesign to make corrections. Here are two fixes.
1. Why doesn’t ID have feature that allows us to display L/R pages as one vertical page flow like Adobe Reader. Master pages take care of L/R differences. All I want to do is see my text without moving left and then right to keep what I’m editing on screen. 99% of the time I don’t care about seeing a two-page spread as a two-page spread.
2. Why isn’t there an view option to fit and keep the width of a frame on screen like there is for a single page or two page spread? Our books typically have wide margins, so a single-page and two-page display often leaves type too small to proof. We need to be able to choose to see the entire width of a text frame and keep all of it on screen as a scroll through a document.
Mike, why don’t you use Story editor? Just select the story you want to edit and choose Edit > Edit in Story Editor. ID will open a narrow window with all the text in that story and you can just scroll down.
[…] Color me annoyed this morning. It’s not the weather. After all, it’s a typical beautiful day here on the outskirts of Seattle — oppressive near-rain gray, just the way I like it. No, once again my frustration turns to InDesign. As you all know, I love InDesign, but love is like a magnet: It can repulse as quickly as it attracts. So forgive me a short IDSGOM, which may be educational to some readers. […]
The list of IDSGOM in CS3 is endless………. I switched back to CS2. CS3 was simply unusable, 20 or more crashes per day…
Anyone who is having 20 crashes a day (or even 3) is not running into bugs in CS3. They’re running into something else. (Font corruption, preferences corruption, or something else…). Yes, CS3 has some bugs, but Paolo, I think your company has some kind of other issue it needs to figure out.
Wow. I’ve had text pasting problems for a long, long time, and could never find a solution on Adobe’s website. Yet I’m finally able to find it on a 3-year-old blog. Adobe’s “customer service” is pathetic.
I just noticed that this happens… What a pain. Is there a solution yet? Im using CS6.