This is really weird. I have headers in my textbook, and they:  From a paragraph with the "H1" paragraph style, pick up text  which is styled by the character style "HeadText1" (which does nothing but allow a Text Variable named "Section" to pull this text and put it in the header), From a paragraph with the "H2" paragraph style, pick up text which is styled by the character style "HeadText2" (which does nothing but allow a Text Variable named "Subsection" to pull this text and put it in the header), and From a paragraph with the "H3" paragraph style, pick up text which is styled by the character style "HeadText3" (which does nothing but allow a Text Variable named "Subsubsection" to pull this text and put it in the header) I have a header that has the text variables <Section> then a tab then <Subsection> then a tab and then <Subsubsection>: Which, on a page with these paragraph and character styles, looks like this: (This section doesn't have any H2 headers so the Subsubsection variable is blank) So far so good. But then, I started noticing that somehow my H1 HeadText1 Section text quit appearing on the second page. I've had this before, and it came down to a tiny bit of text – sometimes even just a paragraph mark – styled with HeadText1. So I just search and destroy that bit of HeadText1 styling. But this time, when that first "6: Wilderness First Aid (1/2)" disappeared, there was no errant HeadText1 styling. I cut all the text in that first section, and the problem disappeared. I tried saving the chapter to an .idml file and back into .indd file to clean it. Still happened. I tried stripping out all of that text, putting into a pure ASCII editor to clean it (I use UEStudio from UltraEdit for this and coding). I copied the text in, and things were going fine until I created a footnote to put some of the footnoted ASCII text into. But simply the act of creating the footnote – a blank footnote – made the problem recur: And that missing header bit stays missing throughout the entire length of the chapter. I thought it might be the footnote pushing something – maybe a paragraph marker – onto the next page. But no, the text does not extend onto the next page when I insert a footnote. It's just the footnote itself that's screwing up the header. Sigh. I thought it might be something weird in the Footnote Text style. But no, it looks pretty plain: I did try "Reset to Base" on the footnote style but the problem still occurred when I did that. I have no clue what's going on. I hope someone else on this forum does! I figured I would try here before calling tech support. Thanks for any help. ... View more

I have already posted this in UserVoice, but cross-posting here so others can see my workaround. And who knows, maybe suggest a better workaround? I am creating flowcharts within InDesign as it seems to work better for me than in Illustrator. The Layers Panel allows me to do this. But I really, really wish I didn't have to do this workaround. These are my personal notes for future reference: Grouping for complex assemblages of objects: creating a new group This is needed because the Layers Panel won't allow you to group items deep in the Layers Panel, only if they're at the top level; you can't create a "Group within a Group." - Use Layers Panel - Keep two objects (doesn't matter what) off the page named "Dummy Object," select them with the mouse, then Menu > Object > Group - Rename this to what you want your group's name to be - Drag TWO OR MORE objects or groups into this group - Drag the two Dummy Objects to the top of the Layers panel to get them out of the group - Drag the new group to the right position in the Layers panel ... View more

I have a problem. I have a workspace called Keith. It is my default. When I open a file on my laptop, it opens with the Keith workspace. However, when I open a file on my desktop, it opens with either the Essentials workspace or no workspace. I have trashed my preferences, twice, once with an older version and just now with InDesign 2025. I keep my worskpaces synced between my laptop and desktop using GoodSync (wonderful program). I just moved all of my workspaces to a backup folder and then copied all of my workspaces from my laptop to my desktop but the problem persists. Obviously there is something that is not in a workspace file, and not in Preferences, that is telling InDesign the wrong thing about which workspace I want.   Anyone have any idea where that erroneous information resides and how I can correct it?   Thanks in advance. ... View more

The first four of this series present (what I hope are) InDesign best practices for working with certain types of documents, which I developed over the past couple of decades of working with InDesign (and before that, Xerox Ventura Publisher). I use InDesign not as my "day" (but often night) job  – that's being an academic emergency physician and medical school professor, with a subspecialty of the medical aspects of mountain and cave rescue.   I started using InDesign for handouts for classes I teach. You can see examples of the PDFs I have produced using InDesign at http://www.conovers.org/ftp/ including, for just a couple of examples: http://www.conovers.org/ftp/Ticks.pdf and http://www.conovers.org/ftp/Poison-Ivy.pdf.   As you will note from those two samples, there are lots of references, more so in the ticks handout. Managing such lists of references, in the approved medical manner of using superscripted numbers in the text in order of appearance in the main text, can be a royal pain. The application EndNote has justifiably become very popular for managing references and taking care of this for you: I can download a PDF, and drag and drop it into EndNote. The PDF metadata creates a bibliographic record in EndNote. For references I can find in Google Scholar, without a PDF, I can click "Cite" and the biliographic record gets imported into EndNote. I can group the records by topic, or search them, making it easy to find the ones I want to cite in my document.   And, if I'm working in Microsoft Word, I can select a bibliographic record in EndNote, up at the top of the screen, pick a citation standard such as that for the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM), click a button, and the superscripted number appears in my text in Word, and the NEJM-formatted reference appears in the bibliography at the end of that document with that number attached to it. Slick.   But. Have you every tried to do graphic layout in Word? It is enough to make you want to punch your computer. Don't, it's not the computer, it's Word. Don't get me wrong. Having used word processors back to CP/M and DOS days, Word is really quite good at its primary job. Especially because I use AutoHotKey to remap keys to be roughly similar to the old WordStar control keys (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordStar#Interface). That way I can touch-type many commands without my fingers having to leave the keyboard. I could do something similar directly in Word, but by using AutoHotKey I can use similar keystrokes in all sorts of other programs, including here in my browser, and in my programming editor, UltraEdit (actually UEStudio which has a spellchecker and other features as well as all of the context hinting of UltraEdit for actual programming, including writing AutoHotKey macros, though you have to manually add the context hinting for AutoHotKey). For more about usability and switching input modes, see https://ed-informatics.org/2010/02/11/medical-computing-10/. Yes, another medical subspeciality of mine is informatics, particularly usability and UX (overall User eXperience).   As I said, Word sucks at graphic layout; its attempts to make things easier for you actually makes things harder, but with integration with EndNote, it makes writing academic papers with references a breeze. (I remember, not at all fondly, the days when I had to manually format every reference.)   Unfortunately, EndNote has no similar integration into InDesign.   So, you just need to write the document in Word, then Place the Word document in InDesign, and do your graphic layout in InDesign. But. There is this "little" problem with Word import into InDesign. Unless you create and use Word character styles for bold, italics and superscript instead of the builtin ways to do these things, InDesign will change text to (for example), italics, but not change it back out of italics when Word changes back to italics. Then you end up with an InDesign file that looks like: If you manually change every instance of italics or bold in the Word document to a character style (is there some easy way to do this? I don't know of one), you still have a problem. Note that EndNote automatically applies superscript after every superscripted reference in the text, and the text stays superscripted until something changes it back. As far as I know, there is no way to fix this by assigning a character style instead of Word's internal superscript to the EndNote citations.   So, this is more a plea for best practices than the first four topics in this series, which were suggestions for best practices you should (maybe) emulate.   ... View more

I use InDesign for lots of different things, but the main thing I use it for now is being the author/editor/typsetter/graphic designer of an ~900 page textbook. It has been very painful, and required lots of advice from the experts in this forum, but I have finally got it working. While the process for naming, backup and versioning that I have adopted is specific to this unusual use case, there might be elements of it that others think worth adopting, which is why I'm posting it; your mileage may vary. I will be very interested to see the replies and the good suggestions in them for different use cases.   Naming: See the above screenshot. My filenames consist of several parts. They are designed to make my life easier when I'm looking at a Windows File Explorer or equivalent file display. (I use Directory Opus instead of Windows File Explorer, it's a lovely replacement for File Explorer. The screenshot above is Directory Opus.) The parts are: Textbook Name: the textbook's title is Appalachian Search and Rescue and I've adopted AppSAR as an abbreviation. So, all of the chapter, volume and other files start with AppSAR. After a hyphen as a separator, next is the: Document Number: Arabic numerals for chapters, and Roman numerals. Some files, such as "Chapter Template" and "Library" don't have numerals. And some, such as "Stuff to Copy" and some .icml files don't have document numbers. Next, after a hyphen, is the: Title: Chapter Title: For the chapters, it's the name of the chapter (sometimes abbreviated). Volume Front Matter: for the front matter for the volumes, which includes a Table of Contents for the entire volume, and for the first volume the Introduction and Preface, it's simply "Front-Matter." These are documents, not Book Panels/Book Files: Book Files/Book Panels: for these .indb files, they are titled for the volume whose document files they contain, for exmple, "AppSAR-Volume-I.indb" Other Stuff: (other files, such "Stuff to Copy" and some .icml files to make sure I have the same boxed text in each of several documents, don't have systematic names, because they don't need to.) The above naming conventions make it easier for me to do: Versioning: Versioning, in this context of "Indesign doesn't have builtin versioning" means using the above naming conventions to, fairly painlessly, save dated versions of your documents and be able to revert to them if you do something terribly, terribly bad with your current version. Like making it so you can't open it in InDesign without InDesign crashing. (Yes, this is the voice of bitter experience.) If you look at the above screenshot, you can see dated backup versions of some of the chapters. They have the same name as the current file, but with a date appended to them, in -yyyy-mm-dd format, such as in "AppSAR-1-Short-Term-Survival-2024-07-31.indd." Why, you might ask, put this in the filename since files contain date information? Simple. It's soooo much easier to see dates when they are in the filename. Here is a process for easily creating and archiving such copies, with screenshots. And, you need a unique filename for each version. And, if you do it this way, and keep the files sorted alphabetically, the versions are right under the working file in date order. File > Save a Copy: To create a version, use the InDesign File menu to Save a Copy: You will note that this wants to save this simply with the word "copy" in the filename instead of the date you want. To rename this file to the date, here is a sneaky shortcut to save typing. In the file display above, click on the filename of "AppSAR-2-The-Environment-2024-07-31.indd" and the dialog box shows you that you've about save save your version over "AppSAR-2-The-Environment-2024-07-31.indd" which is not what you want. Instead, you insert your cursor right before the period in the filename, backspace a bit, and type in today's date, so you now see the right filename under which to save today's version: All you have to do is click "Save" and you've saved today's version with the right date on it.  One problem with this is that your folder tends to fill up with dated backup files. The way to deal with this clutter – look at the very first screenshot in this post – is to, from time to time, drag older versions to that "z-Backups" folder you can see near the top of the screenshot. Why is it called "z-Backups" rather than just "Backups"? Simple. That way, when you have your folder sorted alphabetially, it appears at the bottom of your subfolder list, so that you don't have to drag versions as far to drop them in that subfolder.  File > Save As: Once you have saved your dated versoin, there is one other thing you may want to do. I do this every time I save a dated version. With your original, current, undated file open in InDesign, do a "File > Save As" and save over your current file. That's right, save over your current file. Why? Because this cuts down on your file size, and improves InDesign performance when next you edit your file. There is all sorts of undo and other metadate that accumulate in InDesign files and this is a way to clean out that cruft and keep your working file nice and shiny clean. Remember, if you need to do an undo that you just eliminated, you have a dated backup copy. In addition to versioning, I secure all my data by multiple means of: Backup: Having PTSD from data loss in the CP/M days, back before MS-DOS or Windows, I am a belt, suspenders, and second belt and suspenders sort of backup person. I backup all of my data files in several separate ways: Laptop <> Desktop: I have both a big-iron Windows workstation with a 40" curved ultrawide monitor, and a fairly high-end laptop for when I travel. They are both connected to our house Ethernet and thence via FiOS to the wider world. Whenever I am working on my desktop, and I walk away for a while to do housecleaning or eat a meal, I use GoodSync (wonderful program) to sync all of my data files between them. That way, if the power goes out, I can keep working on my laptop and then sync back to my desktop once the power is back on. I also sync before I leave for work or for a trip so I always have all of my data with me in editable form. TrueImage: I use Acronis TrueImage to, nightly, back up my desktop to a portable hard drive. From this image I can restore if my SSD dies. Every month or so I rotate one of my two backup portable hard drives to my locker at work. SOS Online Backup AKA Infrascale Cloud Backup: Early every morning, both my laptop and my desktop do a file backup. To my mind, Infrascale is expensive but worth it: the ability to quickly find and restore a file you accidentally deleted last week is almost priceless. Please poke holes in this system and suggest improvments and variations for other use cases. ... View more