It’s time to reveal the solution (and prize winners) for this month’s InDesignSecrets contest!
This time, the mystery involved some frames that were present in the layout, but were invisible. In the screenshot below, we’re looking at page where there are three frames (as shown in the Layers panel). But only one frame is in view.
As stated in the original post, nothing was hidden, Show Edges was enabled, etc.
So what gives?
The answer we were looking for was Overprint Preview (or Separations Preview). When you have these enabled, frames that won’t appear in printed output disappear—unless you select them. Since the unselected frames had no stroke and no fill, they vanished when Overprint Preview was turned on. Note that this is different from the Preview mode that you can enter by choosing View > Screen Mode > Preview (or by pressing W with nothing selected). In that case, you wouldn’t see the page margins like you do in the screenshot.
Several folks also came up with a clever solution that we hadn’t considered: that the visible frame had a Paper fill, and the other two frames were precisely positioned underneath it. While this wasn’t what we had in mind, it can in fact yield the exact look you see in the screenshot. So in fairness to those folks, I counted their entries as correct.
OK, now for the winner (chosen at random from the correct entries):
Erica Plante
Congratulations, Erica! You win a 2-seat license for the amazing in5 from Ajar Productions!
Thanks again to everyone who entered for taking the time to participate. Keep those emails coming! Next month, we’ll have another fun contest with a brand new prize.
This article was last modified on July 25, 2019
This article was first published on May 27, 2015
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