Haha you don't want to know how many times I've used that form after every upgrade :) I'll run back there to add another one: if at all possible, they ought to put the print process, at least after all data has been gathered, into the background tasks too.

I wanted the CS5 upgrade for this purpose alone. Often creating a PDF and printing that goes faster than printing directly from InDesign, and the added benefit of being able to keep working while doing this is priceless.

The Background Tasks panel should indeed show a history of completed tasks. Let's hope Adobe listens to our feature requests and upgrades the panel in CS6.

philk said:

Thanks David and Joe that will help.

 Am I the only one that wishes it worked more like Illustrator?

No you're not. I hate how it works in InDesign compared to Illustrator. Time to run off to the feature request form on Adobe.com again…

If you can't do it directly from InDesign, maybe you could export to a PDF and print from Acrobat using “Page Scaling” set to  “Multiple pages per sheet” setting, defining the rows and columns yourself?

Ann_Camilla said:

I've bought the CS5 upgrade but can't instal it yet because a couple of plugins I use regularly haven't been upgraded for CS5 which I find frustrating … even so, I'd be interested in hearing whether anyone has opened a CS4/Page Control file as the books sometimes go for reprinting and the covers need resizing or something.

I used Page Control at one point (version 2.0 and 2.1) and then stopped using it. IIRC the few files I actually used it on worked fine when opened later in an install without the plug-in, so my guess is the file will open without any problem. How well everything can be edited I don't dare guess.

You could remove all content from one of your files and send the empty file over to someone who does have CS5 but not the plug-in.

I just made 1 paragraph style with 2 GREP styles and 3 character styles and it worked fine…

Paragraph font size: 18pt
Decimals character style font size: 11pt, baseline shift: 6pt
Underline Decimals character style: underline 20pt, dashed (4 and 4), offset 0pt, gap & underline filled the same
Underline character style: underline 20pt, dashed (4 and 4), offset -6pt, gap & underline filled the same

Character style: Underline Decimals
GREP: \d\d

Chracter style: Underline
GREP: € \d+,

The first GREP style finds two digits, the second finds the Euro sign followed by a space, any number of digits and a comma. Change it to \$ \d+\. if you want to find US$ and use a period instead of a comma.
Keep them in this order, otherwise the underline will mess up.

By the way, I use the baseline shift option to create prices with decimals that've been “superscripted” to my own specs, not the font's. I then apply that style using Nested Styles in the paragraph.

Your computers might be up-to-date, but you were apparently running into memory issues. Add more memory and the problems ought to go away without needing to resize every image every time you want to export a PDF (in my experience 4GB is a minimum, 6 or 8 will suffice, but if you use Windows you'll need a 64-bit OS to take advantage of more than 3GB of RAM).

As for compressing the PDF: if you use Acrobat Pro, you can go to Document > Reduce File Size and that can make the file smaller but your milage will vary. Optionally, if the file stays too big to email and you don't want to use a service like FileMail.com (a site that'll let you send large files for free) you could print the PDF using a setting like “High Quality Print”. That tends to get much smaller files than an InDesign exported PDF using the same settings.