@Jeremy: It's true that home taping didn't kill music, but pirate downloading has crashed the income of many recording artists. I have friends in the music business, touring musicians with well-known artists, who have had to take fairly deep salary cuts and loss of other benefits over the years because the artist's royalties from recording sales plummetted with the original Napster, and have only gone down since then. This isn't because the artists in question aren't popular (they still sell out concerts across the world), it's because for every album they sell, four or five copies are downloaded “free” or are “shared.” Nobody can take an 80% loss of income and carry on as if nothing's changed.

Perhaps because I have this kind of direct, personal experience, I don't think of piracy in terms of “big companies.” I think of it in terms of people who can't be employed by those companies, or who end up losing their jobs, whose families depend on that income. Less income from sales translates straight through to fewer employees and/or fewer employee benefits, not least because salaries are by far the single biggest expense on a company's books.

In much the same way, as Theun pointed out, too many people with bootleg software undercutting legitimate businesses translates into missing job openings for designers, or depressed salaries, or both. This is especially true in small businesses, where business owners quite often pay themselves less than minimum wage.

Piracy issues are easy enough to justify when they're cast in philosophic, abstract terms. But there are always real people involved, and real consequences.

Anne-Marie said:

Try it and let us know if your computer explodes.

---

Um… I tried doing that on one of my computers, and got a strange “System Meltdown” message, just before the magic smoke* leaked out of the hard drive. :-D

* Magic smoke is what makes all electronic devices work. This is proven by the fact that when it leaks out, the device stops working.

lshiffri said:I have been searching and reading everything out there but can't make this work. I need page 1 to be on physical page 7. I tried a new master but it shows “page 7” and I cannot figure out how to tell it to start at page 1. If I use special characters>markers the page number is not displayed anywhere. I have not found exact steps anywhere on how this should be done. It doesn't seem like this should be so difficult. Help, please.

Shone's got it right. The situation you describe is the standard one for a book layout. The first physical pages, containing the half-title, title, copyright, TOC, preface and sometimes other bits are collectively called “Front Matter.” They are almost always given lowercase roman numerals (whether they are shown, as on the TOC, Preface, etc., or not, as on the title and half-title pages). In the Numbering and Section options for that section, you would choose lowercase roman numerals. The seventh page is the actual beginning of the book, so it is the start of a new section, and its Numbering and Section Options should be set to start numbering at page 1 and to use regular Arabic numerals.

It's worth noting that unless you explicitly set something else in PDF export, your images will be jpeg-compressed on export and will be downsampled if more than 1.5x your target resolution, which at the default 300 ppi for print means that any image over 450 ppi at the size it is scaled to in the layout (the “effective resolution” in InDesign terms) will be downsampled. It's just part of how PDF export works.

There are two schools of thought on this. One school says you should exactly size each image in Photoshop and place the resized copy in the layout. The other, more production-oriented view says place each one as a PSD and let the export-to-PDF function handle the downsampling, which in my experience works perfectly well for all but very high-end, critical print work. In either case, use the jpeg compression setting that works with your production needs, or turn off compression completely, in the PDF export dialog.

Placing a PSD is much more productive (“Edit Original” allows round-tripping to Photoshop for any needed tweaks) than first making a jpeg or flattened tiff and placing that in the layout. It can save many hours in the course of a week. Quality degradation with jpeg is far less of an issue than most people believe, but in any case is avoided by keeping the image in a lossless format such as PSD.

There's no way to do this with the automatic page numbering built into InDesign, but there is a way to at least reduce the pain.

1. At the page immediately after the one where you're going to insert the “point pages” use the Section and Numbering options to create a new section. Turn off automatic numbering and type in the current page number as a value for the starting page.
2. Insert your new pages, but override the automatic page number on each new page and replace the automatic value with the explicit “point page” number (7000.1, 700.2, etc.)

Unless you have dozens of these per issue, it shouldn't become too unwieldy. I assume that the client “resets” the book every so often, so you get a fresh document every so often without (or fully incorporating) the inserted matter that lets you begin the cycle again.

Check that your document color profile was set to ProPhoto before you placed the image, and that your colour management policies for RGB are to Preserve Embedded Profiles. If you place the image in a document with a default RGB profile and set (as different from convert to) a different color profile, or if your colour management settings convert incoming color profiles if they're different from the default, you would then have an extra profile conversion being applied that would definitely mess with the output.

Hi Maggs… Once you (or someone) has changed the name in an export dialog to something other than the document name, it's “sticky,” as you've noticed. To get back to the default, change the export name to the same name as the document, then save and close. Save As will thereafter default to the new document name in the export dialog.

I'd take a wild guess that CS4 was installed using the US English setting, and CS3 with International English setting. I don't have multiplie suite copies with the different settings to test this out, but I could see ID forcing the change when the copy is imported from an International English install to a US English install. If I recall correctly, there were odd issues with International English versions during the prerelease testing of CS4 products (fixed prior to launch, I'm pretty sure), so there are obviously some obscure-but-significant internal differences depending on which option you choose during the installation.

The simplest workaround is probably to just go ahead and bring in everything you're going to be working with, then do a global Find/Change targeting that specific formatting setting. Save the query for reuse as needed, since you'll likely be wanting it again, by the sound of things.