Tim Cole's InDesign BackChannel

Have you ever had to design a brochure or other marketing document, and then been tormented by the task of setting up your document correctly to account for the folding required to complete the piece?

There's a new product available now from FoldRite that's designed to take the worry and hassle out of setting up different types of folded documents in InDesign. I played with it a bit the other day, and I found it to be both a valuable and easy to use utility. If you create folded printed pieces, you'll definitely want to have a look at this one, because it just might eliminate a lot of headaches for you.

Both the web and plug-in versions of the FoldRite utility have essentially the same user interface.

The product is available in two forms, a plug-in utility (available at a discounted price of $299 until July 31st), or as a hosted online service where you can construct and download a template for $9.99.

You can find an animated online demo here that shows you how the interface works.

You use the animated interface to select and (if necessary) modify the settings to create the template you need. FoldRite creates new InDesign file that contains the rules and marks required to construct your job.

The finished product is an InDesign template that's ready-made with the required fold guides and markings necessary for printing and folding your document.

One of the very cool features of the plug-in version is its ability to "update" (remodel, really) an existing document. Suppose you're half-way thru a project that you're not sure you've set up correctly. You can run the FoldRite plug-in on an already existing InDesign document to get the correct setup applied to your file.

Posted by Tim Cole at 06:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (10)

Based on what we're seeing in our incoming crash logs, it appears that 10.5.4 has solved the NavServices crash problems.

We’re also noticing, however, that some users are still hitting a problem that was introduced by a VersionCue 3.1 update last year. For a subset of users, the update did not install the VersionCueUI framework. As a result, when invoking a NavServices dialog (i.e., place, relink, save as, etc.), they will crash--not because of a Leopard problem, but because their VersionCueUI framework was not updated.

This problem affects a relatively small percentage of users, but we've received crash logs from users on 10.5.4 that are experincing this crash.

If you've installed 10.5.4 and are still experiencing a crash when invoking the Place or other system navigation dialogs, then please review the information below.

We’ve had a Knowledge Base article on this VersionCue updater issue late 2007. We have sent the email below to users that have sent us crash logs in the past couple months:

You’ve recently submitted an InDesign crashlog for a crash you hit when attempting to open one of the system file dialogs (Open, Place, Save As, Export, or Relink). The cause of this crash is a failed installation of a VersionCue update. Here is a link to an Adobe support webpage that will give you some more detail and a solution:
http://www.adobe.com/go/kb402521

If you area also running MacOS 10.5 (aka Leopard), I highly recommend that you get Apple’s latest update, 10.5.4, which was posted yesterday. To get this, choose “Software Update...” under your Apple menu. This latest update fixes another common case of InDesign unexpectedly quitting when attempting to access these dialogs in Leopard.

Finally, earlier today, Adobe posted an update to InDesign CS3, version 5.0.3, which fixes several critical bugs in other areas of the product. To get this update, choose “Updates...” under the Help menu in InDesign CS3. Alternatively, you can download the 5.0.3 updater from: http://www.adobe.com/support/downloads/detail.jsp?ftpID=3961

Thank you for submitting crashlogs. Although we cannot respond to every submission, we review them regularly and work to address the most serious issues.

Posted by Tim Cole at 04:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (11)