Yah! That did it!

After eight months of having no smart guides, now they have returned! :-D

Thank you. Reya1600!

I was reluctant to trash and reset my preferences because there are so many little personal tweeks in my preferences I am sure I would not be able to remember them all. Now I don’t have to.

Thank you again.

Thank you, both Tim and Bob, for your replies.

Mostly I work in RGB because the vast bulk of stuff I produce is printed on an inkjet printer and there is nothing to be gained by working in CMYK for an inkjet — indeed, because the monitor is always in RGB, colours are only an approximation so there is some loss. The only time I use CMYK is if I am producing something to go to a commercial (usually web offset) printer.

The use of the Direct Selection Tool (whose name I can never remember so I call it simply “the white arrow”) is the hint I needed. It works a treat with greyscale images and also, of course, with b&w bitmaps. What a pity it doesn’t work with Illustrator files. I use these fairly frequently and, if ever I need to convert one that is in black and white to colour, I still need to go back to the original .ai file and change the stroke and fill colour of every single item in the image. Is there a quicker way to do that? Is there some way to do it in InDesign?

I have been using InDesign since version 2.0 and I am still learning!

I too am using Lion OS. That’s what 10.7.3 is (though now I am using 10.7.4, but it is still Lion). Since my MacBook Pro is a late 2011 model, I would hardy describe it as “old”. And it, too, uses Lion OS.

Curiously, the problem seems to have resolved itself. I still get the dialog box but now clicking either the “Allow” or the “Deny” button actually works. Why it works now and didn’t work before is a complete mystery to me. It wasn’t the change from 10.7.3 to 10.7.4 as the improvement came some time after I installed the upgrade to the OS.

I guess it must have something to do with sacrificing fatted calves to the computer gods! :-)

Wow! When I posted on 22nd May I thought this thread was done. Turn you back for five minutes and so many more posts appear!

Thank you for your offer, Chris. Since the document included some sensitive material, I had planned to replace the non-affected text with lorem ipsum before exporting an IDML file to send you but, in view of the posts by BoazE and David, that seems a little irrelevant now. If you would still like an IDML file, let me know and I will still do it.

Yes, BoazE and David, you do seem to have cracked it, though I am intrigued by your inability to expand the pictures in Safari, David. That is my browser of choice and they expand fine for me.

But one little mystery remains: how on earth did the hyperlink destinations get in there in the first place?

The Word files that have been placed in my InDesign document are all straight-forward text files with no hyperlinks and no hyperlink destinations in them. They have paragraph styles but very few of them, mostly just “Body” and “Reference”. The hyperlink destinations have only ever appeared (in InDesign) at the beginning of the “Reference” paragraph at the end of each Word file import and perhaps it is of significance that each of these “Reference” paragraphs is aligned to the right and begins with an em-dash?

I just tried importing one of the offending Word files into another InDesign document and the hyperlink destinations appeared as before. Yet there is nothing in the Word file to indicate that it is anything other than formatted text. Weird!

As I said before, this is not a PROBLEM for me as it hasn’t caused any production difficulties. It just an intriguing mystery.

It gets even weirder!

The Find/Change dialog box on the Glyph tag tells me the character has the unicode value of 0020 and, when I look that up on a unicode table, it is simply a space. To check this, I selected an “ordinary” space in the text and did the same right-click, Load in Find, routine and it, too, gave a unicode value of 0020.

Yet the characters that are intriguing me, as seen in my second screen shot above (message 3), has a peculiar graphic representation in the story editor whereas an “ordinary” space appears simply as one single blue dot.

I do love a good mystery but this one seems to have a desperate need for Columbo or (for British readers) Miss Marple or Poirot!

Hmmm…

If Jongware doesn’t know, who on earth does? :) The Blatman perhaps?

I am the author of the document in question and nobody else has worked on it, although I first created it over two years ago and have updated it frequently as circumstances have demanded. However, I have put in no bookmarks ever and no index markers ever. The document is not long enough to warrant either, being less than 20 pages A5.

The mystery deepens.