Sometimes Being A Little Nerdy Pays Off_part2

We use Indesign for everything we do. So the worst thing to hear is when someone is having indesign problems.

I had a guy this week who spent two hours working on a page, and when he went to save it,it wouldn’t let him. you couldn’t save, save as, export, print, nothing.

The problem: This guy is still new, he’s learning his way around the office and still trying to develop a workflow. I didn’t want to have to quit his indesign and make him start over, costing him two hours of work. That would just put him to far behind all day. And since I can’t leave until everyones done, I wanted to avoid that option at all cost.

My Solution:
So my thoughts were why not paste all his work into Illustrator. Well you can paste into illustrator but when you paste it back into indesign, your not really getting the original file back. Just a low res place holder. Most people don’t understand that because they see the image on the page so they don’t bother to check. But when the file goes to the printer and the high resolution file isn’t in there, it’s going to be a big problem.

And Photoshop is no better. You can paste stuff in as Smart Objects, which is an object that retains it’s original resolution no matter how much it’s scaled. sound’s good at first, but the only way to edit a smart object is to double click the layer that it’s on, which opens the file in illustrator, which takes you back to the above problem.

So my only hope at saving his work was to open a new indesign file, leave it named “Untitled-1″. Paste all the work he had done into that file, then force quit indesign. while indesign was closed, I removed his preference file. Thats the file that controls the basic functions of indesign, like saving, where objects are positioned on a page, how your fonts look, etc…. I then reopened indesign.

2 things happened
#1 When you remove a corrupted preference file, then reopen, indesign automatically creates an new preference file. So we now have the ability to save our files again. #2 because I force quit indesign, it treats it like a crash. Indesign has a built in data recovery file in your preferences. so when ever a crash happens it tries to recover all the data that was on the page, I will say this is not a sure cure. Sometimes it can’t recover all the data. But with no options left, it was worth a shot.

So when I reopened indesign, it automatically reopened that “Untitled-1″ document where I pasted all the work that had been done.

now all he had to do was rename the file and save.

~ by Nic on March 14, 2008.