Tim Cole's InDesign BackChannel

Roaming Preferences

InDesign Secrets received a good question from an InDesign user in the Netherlands:

[W]e would like to move the preference folder of InDesign 4.0 outside this profile. I did do this for Adobe Photoshop by entering a text string into the registry, but unfortunately it does not work that way for InDesign (does it for other CS2 components?).

According to an InDesign engineer:

In CS2, preferences, caches, and temp files went into “%USERHOME%\Application Data\Adobe\InDesign\Version x.y\”. The only mitigation you can do is (via the preferencews UI) select a new folder for temporary database files to live in.

In CS3, Adobe made changes so that only files that are smaller (and actually preferences) went into what we considered the roaming part of the profile, i.e. “%USERHOME%\Application Data\Adobe\InDesign\Version x.y\”.  Files that were caches or temp files now go into “%USERHOME%\Local Settings\Application Data\Adobe\InDesign\Version x.y\” which we expect to not roam.

There are, unfortunately, no hidden InDesign-specific registry entries by which users can redirect these folders at this time.

Adobe’s Bob Bringhurst sent me this alert today:

LiveDocs commenting is now available in the web version of Help. In Adobe Help, click This page on the Web at the bottom of any topic. Once you’re in the web version of Help, click the Add Comment button.

This means that InDesign users all over the world can now comment upon, extend, expand, reinterpret, refute, and write rap-able, rhyming versions of the InDesign documentation.

Anne-Marie Concepcion gave a big thumbs-up to the new LiveDocs feature for Photoshop:

In Photoshop CS3′s help pages, if you click on any "This page on the
web" link at the bottom of a help page; you arrive at a page at
"livedocs.adobe.com" … the same help page but with the ability to
add a comment to the documentation, to follow those comments via RSS
or get emailed when people add comments to it.

So very, very cool!

When are we (InDesign users) getting livedoc help pages? AFAIK it’s
only the Photoshop ones.

I have learned from the documentation people that LiveDoc pages for InDesign, InCopy, and Bridge are coming soon. I didn’t get an exact date, but it sounds like you won’t have to wait too much longer.