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• • July 31, 2013 at 5:53 am #64601
    Allan Jackson

    Participant

    Hi all
    I wonder if anyone can point me to a discussion of best practices for coping with multiple templates, masters and users in CS4 on Windows 7 on recent HP machines with 8GB of memory (we bought CS6 but have to use CS4 because our workflow and advertising software has not been updated yet). We put out a number of tabloid newspapers and smaller publications each week and are in the process of converting from Quark to ID. As I was the only slightly experienced ID user among our six or seven subs, I became the guru and responsible for first-line support and template creation.
    So far so good but, with a growing number of templates (up to 3 or 4 templates for the sections in each publication and up to 10 masters in each template), it is becoming more and more time-consuming to implement style changes. The other major problem we have is that there is no way to lock the document styles and defaults so that a misdirected click by a user can’t change everything for the worse. I get several calls an hour asking why the contents of such and and such a text box have lost their style or why my lovingly crafted and tested Grep style suddenly just doesn’t work on a particular machine. I had a case earlier today where a style worked in one text frame on a page but not in another???
    Does the community view CS4 as a good version of the software? It seems quite fiddly to us with many usability issues and, under intensive use this last week, it has been quite flaky as well. We have had more than a few crashes and at other times it partially stops being responsive , to mouse-clicks, for example. We usually have only one page open at a time so the load shouldn’t be a factor. When you’re grinding out a couple of hundred pages in an average week, the last thing that’s needed is a temperamental fiddly system.
    I apologise for banging on a bit. Hope someone can help with a nice article or advice on keeping our styles shipshape.
    Thanks.

  • July 31, 2013 at 6:46 am #64604
    David Blatner

    Keymaster

    CS4 was certainly a pretty good release; I don’t think there was anything particularly “fiddly” about it. :)

    The best way to avoid people messing up templates is educating your employees, honestly. Another solution many companies use is to set up an InCopy workflow, so that editors only manage the text, and don’t mess with the styles so much.

    There are certainly some major differences between QX and ID, and that can cause headaches for weeks as people get used to the changes. Again, education is key.

  • August 2, 2013 at 6:56 pm #64655
    Allan Jackson

    Participant

    Thanks David. I’ll take a look at InCopy to see if it will fit in with out our workflow software – it’s very fussy.
    Out of interest, yesterday we encountered the ghost text wrap inherited from the page master that you wrote about a while ago. Armed with that knowledge, I was able to get the layout sub up and running immediately and amend the template for the other pages in the publication.
    So, thanks for that as well.
    Allan

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