I guess I didn't notice that line when I cleaned up other things in Acrobat Pro (the edit you noticed on 7/20), including other lines, a typo in the text, etc. But since I ended up rebuilding the entire ad in InDesign, it's a non-issue - the PDF is no longer needed for the magazine. ... View more

Okay, you know better than I do what is or is not appropriate to report. Here's the link to the report: https://indesign.uservoice.com/forums/601180-adobe-indesign-bugs/suggestions/46973860-certain-placed-pdfs-look-fine-but-become-strange-w ... View more

Sorry I have been so slow to reply here, but for the last couple days I've had unrelated other fires to put out. The day after this all started, I rebuilt the whole ad in InDesign (with an Adobe font the original person was happy with). If she had been determined to use the original font, I would have made a high-res image of the ad as suggested by Uwe. The hardest part of recreating the ad was getting the wavy blue frame as a vector - I forgot exactly how I did it, but it involved Word -> Illustrator -> InDesign.   But I was still interested in how this bug analysis would turn out. Thanks to everyone for all your testing. It seems like there isn't anything to report to the InDesign UserVoice, since it has the same problem in other software, so the culprit is the original PDF. It would be nice to know what combination of software versions on the ad creator's Mac causes it (she did try the export again after changing the font, but it still had the problem, so it wasn't a fluke), but figuring that out might not be possible or worth the effort. The biggest thing I've learned is to carefully inspect print-ready PDFs before sending to press even if things looked fine in the mid-term.   The editing on July 20th was me tweaking it in Acrobat Pro to align elements better. That is not when things went awry - the original PDF has the same problem.   Brad, you said it worked to make the fill color of the graphic frame black, but I had already tried that - in my case, there was no change in the visual output, so apparently the area vacated by the erroneously shrunk black rectangle is white, not transparent. I'm surprised that worked for you. ... View more

Thanks for the heads up! I could work around a problem with one ad (convincing the person who made it to let me use fonts I have access to and rebuild the ad myself), but if I become unable to export the resulting magazine with marks and bleed, yikes! I'm crossing my fingers that InDesign doesn't update itself somehow - CC's Preferences says auto-update is off, but although I don't remember asking for updates in a long time (months), seven of my nine installed apps are up to date.   If you get time to look at the files tomorrow, it's appreciated. Meanwhile I'm dropping hints to the ad creator that rebuilding might become necessary. (I don't like the font she chose anyway - it has a very weird M glyph.) ... View more

I have a related question. I discovered that in addition to a .pdx file and .log file in the folder being indexed, it creates a new subfolder with the name I chose for the index and puts two files in it (a tiny index.idx and a very large index1.idx). Having that extra subfolder is a bit confusing, since in the two catalogs I've made so far, I've named the catalog something similar to the target folder's name (for obvious reasons, since that's the thing I'm indexing). Is there a way to have those index files in the same (top) folder rather than a new subfolder? I can rename the catalogs with something more distinctive, like "PDF index - JH archives" instead of "JH archives", but I would prefer to simply have no additional folder at all, but just the four files.   By the way, it's still utterly baffling that the browse for adding folders to the exclusion list starts at the top of my user area. After all, the whole point is what folders to exclude that are under the folder being indexed, so the rest of the file system is meaningless! [scratches head] ... View more

Due to space constraints on my laptop, I need this to stay on the network drive. But I've done the hard part now, because when I open the catalog to the place where I tell it to rebuild, it fortunately remembers all my excluded subdirectories. I'll probably set up a few catalogs for other places I search a lot - thanks for the clues.   Aside: I didn't know that more than one post can be marked as the "correct answer" in this forum - thanks for doing that, because indeed, it's the combination of things you and I wrote that would be most helpful to others. There have been other threads in the past where I didn't know what to mark as correct because none were complete by themselves - now I know I can mark more than one. ... View more

Thanks for the response. Are you saying that I would need to edit each of the PDFs to add an embedded index, then create a catalog for those indexed PDFs, and every time I create a new PDF (export from InDesign) I would need to add an index to it and update the catalog to include it? These PDFs span many years, and I find the file timestamps useful. So not only would adding indexes to each of them be very laborious, all the file timestamps would be changed. If this is what you're suggesting, I'd much rather redo my file structure to avoid subfolders in the first place.   Why isn't there simply a choice of whether to include subfolders in the search or not? That's a normal part of most other search dialogs, shell commands, etc. I don't mind the slowness of searching non-indexed PDFs - I just want to be able to restrict it to one folder level sometimes. ... View more

As I said, the issue is not repeatable. It only happened once, and I don't know what action triggered it. After removing and restoring the PDF, the swatch was no longer treated as connected to it. If you are asking how XD18 would act if used to open the errant document, I assume you can test that yourself with the simplified one I attached. I suspect it will still claim the swatch is used by the PDF, because the glitch is clearly in the document, not the software. I'm in the middle of a magazine cycle at the moment, so I don't want to do upgrades of critical software until the crunch is over. I can try it in about three weeks, but as I said, you should be able to see for yourself with the document I attached. ... View more

I don't know what a MAX update is, but I have InDesign 17.4 x64, running on Windows 11 21H2. The computer was bought in July - before that, this magazine was designed on a Windows 10 PC.   The ad PDF was placed during design of the Summer issue of the magazine. The swatch was not created then - I just now verified that it does not exist in the final document of the Summer issue. I added the swatch for text headings of an article in the Autumn issue (not on the same spread as the PDF - the article was on pages 10-11 and the PDF on p. 27). Sometime between then and when the Autumn issue was finalized, the swatch became weirdly associated with a part of that PDF. No, the issue is not reproducible - after removing the PDF and placing it again, the problem did not reappear.   Attached is a simplified version of the document. I have embedded the PDF, removed all other pages, elements, styles, and swatches. The offending swatch has been changed to a spot color for ease of testing. To see the issue, just go to Separations Preview and turn off CMYK - the little black logo will stay visible (at least on my computer). ... View more

Thanks. I think you were writing and didn't see my reply to the first response. It was a glitch - InDesign thought the swatch was used by a piece of a PDF that wasn't even the same color. InDesign crashed when I tried to replace the swatch. After deleting the PDF and placing it again, the problem did not reappear. ... View more

There is no 'select by colours' that could highlight a quick way to answer your question.   There is "Find this color" (just a shortcut for "Find/Change", Color tab, Find Color=the swatch, Search="Document", Type="All Frames"), which normally does the trick for me.   Then check one layer at a time (select > all and check the layer list if that little square appears after a layer's name indicating something is selected. Check pages and Master pages (called Parent now). Maybe a style (Character, Paragraph, object, cell, table...) or just something small on the pasteboard is using it.   "Find this color" will find uses of a swatch in any layer and any page, including parent pages and the pasteboard. Not sure about hidden objects, but I had already checked for those. That's why I assumed it was a style.   Failing all that. I would set the colour to be a spot colour to check the colour separation in InDesign...   "Failing all that"? You would have done all that other stuff first? It turns out this was the best clue in your reply - by far the fastest way to solve the mystery. I had to google to figure out where to find color separations, but it's Separations Preview in the Output panel. So I changed that swatch to Spot Color, turned off CMYK in Separations Preview, and scrolled through the pages. The only thing still visible was a small logo inside a PDF of an ad.   But that was weird, because placing a PDF doesn't create swatches. (And the logo was black, not the olive green of the stubborn swatch.) When I tried to remove the swatch and replace with black, InDesign crashed. So I realized it was some sort of anomaly. When I reopened, I deleted the PDF, removed the swatch, and placed the PDF again. No more problems.   As for your side comment: I used to use a template, but often there are little tweaks I make to improve my styles, and it's hard to remember what I've changed and make the same changes a second time in the template. So it ended up much easier to just consider the previous issue my template. The routine to prep it for the next time only takes me a few minutes.   ... View more

That was perfect - thank you! I guess the override called "OT contextual alternates" was actually saying that it was disabled, not enabled - that hadn't occurred to me. ... View more

[Healing Brush] doesn't have the same action on the audio as Delete does; it 'heals' irregularities. I didn't realize that. I haven't been using Paintbrush->Delete much because it seemed that the Spot Healing Brush did the same thing in one step instead of three (select/delete/deselect), but I'll experiment with it more in different situations.   There isn't any means within Audition to restrict mouse movement to a single degree of freedom... Yes, there is - for vertical moves with the Spot Healing Brush. Select that tool and then hold Shift while dragging the mouse and you'll see. Apparently it doesn't work for the Paintbrush tool though.   This is the curse of using multiple Adobe applications - I end up wishing A would work like B and C would work like A. For example, I wish hotkeys for scrolling and zooming the timeline in Premiere Pro would work like they do in Audition. And for this situation, I wish the Spot Healing tool in Audition would work like Photoshop. In Photoshop, you can click in one place, then hold Shift and click somewhere else, and it will heal in a line segment connecting the two (great for removing things like power lines!). I'll check out DragLock - thanks for the tip. ... View more

Thanks for the expert reply. Considering not only your description of the process, but also the fact that in Multi-Track I can't see the spectral display (this noise is more obvious visually than audibly, especially during sections where the content is dominant), I'll do your second suggestion. I tend to use the Spot Healing Brush Tool rather than paintbrush and delete, but I assume they have a similar result.   But I have another question about that, which has been bugging me for years. When getting rid of some bang or pop that is "vertical" on the spectral display, you can hold shift while dragging the spot healing brush up or down and it will go in a straight line. But that doesn't work for dragging horizontally - is there a trick I don't know about? I often deal with brief periods of steady-frequency noise that I could remove quite easily if I could draw a line straight sideways, but my hand isn't that steady, so I make a mess of it. The Marquee Selection Tool can make a short-but-very-wide rectangle, but its selection is too harsh - Delete makes a hard black rectangle (total removal) instead of the gentler reduction that spot healing and paintbrush do. ... View more

We're already using replies - that's the whole point of the question. I can sort comments, but I can't sort replies.   Okay, attached is a recent real-world example. In even just this one file there are two different ways that multiple replies are ordered, for some mysterious reason. The first person to look at the file was our proofreader, KPR - he highlighted six spots in the text and wrote about each one. (He seems to never write his comment directly with his highlight, but highlights the text and then writes a reply to himself. I've tried to explain, but he keeps doing it this way - that's fine.) The next person to look at it was our managing editor Wendy Marshall, who replied to four of them. Then I (Karen) added a reply to two of them, and Wendy responded to me with her final decision.   The first two comments (in Page order - highlighted text was "Lots of" and "sung") have replies ordered the way I would like them all to be - first KPR, then each additional reply in order. That's actually unusual - most of the time the order is more like the last two comments in this file. In particular, notice the one about "JOEEjoee.jp" (next to last in Page order) - If I were to number the replies in the order they were written, they would be 2, 3, 4, 1 - that is common in these PDFs, and it drives me crazy! The last one only has two replies, but is also that way: 2, 1.   Now do you understand my question? ... View more

Thanks for the reply. But I am indeed referring to something else. I'm happy to have the comments sorted by "Page" (location on the page). What I want to fix is the sorting order of the replies under each comment. ... View more

Okay, I made a feature request - if you are so inclined, please vote for it. https://indesign.uservoice.com/forums/601021-adobe-indesign-feature-requests/suggestions/44025912-show-grid-in-front-of-some-layers-but-not-all ... View more

I'm not sure what relevance this argument has to the original question (which was excellently answered by rob day - I learned a lot from his explanation!), but the title and explanation of the image in Wikimedia says it's a long s. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Long_S-I_Garamond_sort_001.png ... View more

That makes a lot of sense. I thought overriding master items was like detaching but with a reversal option, but now that you explain it, it's more like how styles work. If I have a paragraph in a P-style, and then change only the font size, anything else (font family, color, alignment, kerning, etc.) that is changed in the style will still affect that text instance. The mechanic is different - master items are overridden by Shift-Ctrl-click without changing any attribute, while styles are overridden when an attribute is changed. But the end result is apparently more similar than I realized. Thanks again! ... View more

Thanks, Rob. In what ways could changing a master item still affect an overridden item? Although I rarely base masters on other masters (if I had realized it worked the same as pages based on masters, I would not asked the original question), I'm somewhat aware of how masters can still affect pages with overwritten master items. I know that I can "remove" selected overrides (reverting the item to how it is in the master), which can be handy. On the other hand, it is frustrating when a page happens to change which side of the spread it's on (due to adding or removing an odd number of pages earlier in the document) and suddenly the page is full of extra master items (in addition to the overridden ones). But I'm not aware of how an overridden item's attributes could be affected by changes in the master item while the override is still in force - I'm always happy to learn.   In this particular case, after I overrode the items, I went to Master Options for "School" and changed the "Based on Master" to "[None]" - that should detach everything, right? After that, I deleted the Outside and Inside masters, which would have further sealed the deal. ... View more

After posting, I realized the School master's elements could be overridden just like those on a normal page. I used Shift-Ctrl with a dragging action across the whole page (my usual way of overriding) and then could safely base it on "None" and remove the unneeded masters. I came back here to report that, and discovered that Manan had basically said the same thing (menu method of overriding instead of selection method) already. I'll give Manan the "correct answer" credit. ... View more