When you compress images during InDesign export, the type of compression can, sometimes, make a big difference, depending on the type of drawing. For line art, if I remember correctly, "Nearest neighbour" can give much better and sharper results than some of the other settings. Worth playing around with a little more. And obviously, if there's any way of using vector art rather than bitmap, that would also save a lot of space. ... View more

When you update the table of contents, it reverts to the basic table of contents formatting. Any custom formatting is lost, and will have to be redone. The best option is to convert the page numbers to live cross-references. That way, if pages are added or deleted, the page numbers update automatically and you never need to click on the "Update table of contents" option again! You can create the cross-references manually in InDesign (which is pretty quick and doable if there are only a handful), or there is my paid solution (a script), LiveTOC: https://www.id-extras.com/products/livetoc/ ... View more

If you do actually have the ME version, as @Willi Adelberger says, in the Story panel (the same place where you would set optical margin alignment) you also have a small icon at the bottom to set the "story direction." The order of the columns in a text frame follows the story direction, so if you want the columns ordered left-to-right, make sure the story direction is set to left-to-right, and if you want columns RTL, make the story direction RTL as well. ... View more

Hi @Cosmosflower, I'm glad you were able to answer your own question! It is true, as you say, that it is not possible to create a comb field in InDesign natively, and it has to be done in Acrobat. However, if you're doing a lot of this, and would nevertheless like a solution in InDesign, take a look at my (not free) FormMaker add-on: https://www.id-extras.com/products/formmaker/ It lets you do, in InDesign, pretty much anything to a form field that you can do in Acrobat, including creating comb fields and much more. There's also a free version for short, one-page forms.   ... View more

That's a good question. I was playing around with it a little and I'm not sure. All I can think of (untested) is to create two superimposed checkboxes. Clicking on one causes it to hide itself and show the other, and vice versa. That way you provide different visibility configurations for each checkbox. But I think what Adobe intended (if they intended anything at all), or, at least, the simplest option, is to create two buttons side by side. One should be labelled "Show Map" (or whatever it is you're showing), and the other "Hide Map". At that point it is easy to show and hide layers depending on which button has been clicked. ... View more

It should be possible. You need to create a button in InDesign, then add an action ("Show/hide buttons and forms"), and you get this:   ... View more

This one-line script (save it from a text editor with a .jsx extension) will export your document using whatever pdf preset you choose (just change the string between the quotes to the name of your preset): document.exportFile(ExportFormat.PDF_TYPE, File.saveDialog(), true, app.pdfExportPresets.item("YourPresetName")); ... View more

Hi @Robert at ID-Tasker, thanks for the mention. I think the issue @andre_5823 has here is too specific for FormMaker. FormMaker does make it a lot easier to create interactive PDFs, but to automate its contents from a CSV? I think it would need a custom script... ... View more

Insane code as always! Thanks Marc. ... View more

My Autofit Columns script (not free) snaps the column width to the cell content. It takes account of cell and table strokes, and works with rotated tables, etc. Plus, after fitting the columns, it optionally lets you readjust the entire table width proportionally to fit the width of the text frame or column, or a simple fraction of those widths. Worth checking out: https://www.id-extras.com/products/autofit-columns/ ... View more

Great, glad it helped. I just edited the last sentence of my reply (INTERACT_WITH_ALL is what you want at the end of the process).   ... View more

Hi Abhishek, Do you mean that this bug has been fixed inside the new Harfbuzz composer, or do you mean that it's been fixed by providing a workaround to switch to the legacy World-Ready composer? ... View more

I'm also not sure what the question here is, but to make it easier to find a specific keyboard shortcut, click on the "Show Set" button. The shortcut set will open in a text editor, where you can do a plain text search for key-press combinations or InDesign commands. That has helped me in the past... ... View more

Hi Mike, Try this (I haven't tested it though): scaledElements = app.activeDocument.allPageItems; for (i = 0; i < scaledElements.length; i++) { if (scaledElements[i].hasOwnProperty("redefineScaling")) scaledElements[i].redefineScaling(); } ... View more

Understood. ... View more

I'm not aware of any way of preventing a PDF from being shared, along with its unique password. And anyway, password-protected PDFs can be easily cracked (plenty of websites seem to offer an automated service). ... View more

@James Gifford—NitroPress wrote:   As with EPUB, we need a new generation of PDF, one that is adequately controlled, licensed/approved and rated right from the beginning, without letting each shop and developer and doc designer hack around with "improvements" and "better ideas." That's never going to happen, because it's up to each individual developer how much functionality they want to include in their app; not something anyone can control. Unless Adobe were to make a new, closed standard, that only they can make readers for. (Reminds me of the old Microsoft Silverlight framework, which was discontinued.) ... View more

Try driving an exclusive racing car on a regular road. It will destroy the car. A well-crafted interactive PDF is the car, and a top PDF reader is required not to destroy it. There are plenty of situations where the PDF creator would be able to dictate to users what app to use. A course instructor, or in a business/professional environment, and even to the general public if the material is not readily available elsewhere. One in ten users in the real world is still many hundreds of million of people. ... View more

I don't know why people think that PDF doesn't support interactivity. Download this PDF, open it in the free desktop Adobe Reader, and tell me PDF doesn't support interactivity. (The first extra ball is at 60 points). https://www.id-extras.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/Breakout.pdf ... View more

I think "decluttering" is a valid reason, as the OP mentions. ... View more

Make sure you're using the Adobe World-Ready Paragraph Composer (or the World-Ready Line Composer). ... View more

You can't change the baseline shift, either in InDesign or in Acrobat. (In Acrobat, if the field is set to a rich-text field, there is a way to do this). Theoretically, text in a form field in Acrobat is supposed to be centered vertically. In practice, it depends on some property that is defined in the font itself (I don't know if I ever managed to figure out which), so what actually happens in Acrobat is a little font-dependant. If you want the field labels (Surname, House Number, etc.) to line up perfectly with the editable field itself, you might consider turning the labels into text fields in InDesign as well, just make them non-editable (i.e. check the "Read Only" checkbox). ... View more

If you just need to resize an entire InDesign file, master pages and all, to a new size, it's a one-click job with my (not free) https://www.id-extras.com/products/quickresize/ ... View more

No, it can't be done natively in InDesign without FormMaker, unfortunately. Of course it can be done in Acrobat. ... View more

If both paragraph styles are identical apart from the extra space after the last entry in the bulleted list, you can you set the "Space between paragraphs using same style" to 0. For simple cases this works.   ... View more