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August 2, 2019 at 9:52 pm in reply to: Indesign to PDF Erorrs: how to find the bad page that is stopping the process? #14324374
Alan Gilbertson
ParticipantUse “Save As” to create an IDML version. Open that as a new document and try exporting to PDF again. That often solves mysterious problems.
If that doesn’t do it, export page ranges (say 50 at a time to start with) to narrow the target. You should be able to zero in on one (or more) corrupted pages quite quickly. You could also take the binary approach: export pp. 1-350, then pp. 351-700. Divide the “bad” half into two exports in the same way, and so on, dividing by two each time. You’ll find the problem page in a maximum of 10 steps. (Yeah, nerdy. I know.)
August 2, 2019 at 9:44 pm in reply to: Any non-printing character to align baselines of separate text boxes? #14324375ParticipantThat link doesn’t show me the image, just the home page for the site, so I’m guessing a bit.
Is there a reason you can’t simply use a common baseline grid for this? Alignment would be automatic in that case.
ParticipantI’m not sure I have a clear understanding of what you’re trying to accomplish. If I have it right, you may find it will all work if you set up the articles and newsletter as an InDesign Book, then create your cross-document links.
ParticipantCan you tell us which background you’re having trouble with? The pasteboard, the document (paper) background, or a background color that you’ve added to the document? There could be different reasons for each of these.
ParticipantGail, as far as I’m aware, there’s still no effective substitute for a big whiteboard (or table), an Xacto knife and sticky tape, when it comes to large magazines at the dummy stage. They’re such fluid beasts that looking at the design one spread at a time while moving stuff around is a total nightmare. One new ad, and you can be in for an hour of shuffle inside InDesign. Like storyboards for animations or movies, paper sheets are just massively more convenient to work with.
Microsoft’s big Surface Hub is intended as a way to address this with software and hardware (see the Adobe MAX keynotes from 2013 and 2014), but unless you have $10,000 to drop on the project, plus the cost of the software, it’s not likely to be useful in the near future.
Some things are just easier to do in the real world than on a computer. The paradox of rough layout on a computer is that it forces precision at a stage when precision is your worst enemy. At most, throw stuff where it might fit, print it all out, then get out the Scotch tape and scissors. Determine where stuff will go, then build the layout in InDesign.
ParticipantAutomation can only take you so far. I’m collaborating on a book design right now that won’t be amenable to an automated TOC, simply because there are too many nuances to make it worth the effort to automate. There’s not likely to be an automated substitution of characters in the TOC generator any time soon, but I agree there is definitely room for improvement in the current functionality.
Look on the bright side. It wasn’t so long ago that all TOCs had to be built by hand. :)
ParticipantThat’s pretty weird. Try the Weird InDesign Stuff Elimination (WISE) technique:
File > Save As, and choose IDML as the output format. Open the IDML file (creates a new, untitled document) and check if the problem is still there. This fixes myriad cases of oddball errors that don’t make sense, by cleaning out any clutter that the original document has accumulated through being edited.
If the problem goes away, save your new document over the old, corrupted one. As a bonus, you’ll see a — possibly huge — reduction in file size.
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