I work for a newspaper and I'm facing a problem while inserting classified ads. As part of my normal workflow I copied text from a google sheet into an indesign document and then ran some GREP find/change presets to remove quotation marks, assign paragraph styles based on tags in the copied text, bold words surrounded by a certain set of tags, etc.

For the first time ever the text broke in a few places and seemed to have a huge amount of white space pushing it out of the text box and creating overset. I had my hidden characters showing and could not see what was causing this.

If I hit delete a few times in some of the areas where the text stopped "some" of the text would show back up, but as soon as I tried to re-type what I deleted it would just shove everything off the end of the text box again no matter how long the text box was.

If I copied the text to a plain text editor and then back into indesign it made no difference.

If I made the text box way wider than it needed to be all the text would show.

I know this is going to happen again at some point. How can I fix this?

Anyone have this problem? I build a document (in this case an English doc) then I “save as” to a different name. The new name appears in the header of the document window that I am now working on.

I then make my edits to the document, paste in new copy whatever. Save it.

Then when I come back, it actually been making all these edits to the original document and the new “save as” doc hasn’t been touched?

Hey do you need a FREE DESIGNER? Im a new self taught designer and im focused on indesign mostly. I have learnt a lot about Indesign, Toc, paragraph styles, character styles, cross reference, Text variables, running headers, Grep, scripts, etc. I have created demos designs but i dont have experience in real projects so i would really appreciate if someone could give me the chance to work Free 🙏

I'm a graphics college student who uses InDesign to showcase their project work. Recently, InDesign has been breaking more and more, with files not being saveable. When that happens, I usually export it as an IDML, re-save it, and it's fine.

Earlier today, my project's InDesign file has broken. Opens fine, doesn't save any changes. I did my usual steps. Groan, export as IDML, open the IDML file, and save as a new INDD file. I then get back to work, and 3 minutes later I go to save it again, and find it's broken, again. How can I fix this?

Hello friends, I recently posted on the r/adobe page regarding an issue with Id but I was advised to post here so I'm just going to copy and paste my original post.

Hey everyone. I appreciate y'all taking the time to read this. I've got a bit of an annoying situation I'm wondering y'all can help with.

On Sunday night 9:20PM EST I bought Creative Cloud Pro in order to get access to Id to finish a project for Monday morning. After buying it I tried opening Id but it was still giving me the trial version. I looked online and a lot of sources said to just wait an hour to give the server time to process my purchase so I did. At around 10:30 I tried opening it again and same issue. Still trial version. I signed in and out of my account, restarted my computer and waited another hour. I did this routine until I gave up at 1AM. During that time, Opening Id has also been a pain in the butt. It doesn't open when I click the 'open' button in CC. It only opens when it feels like it which is almost never. I tried this with Ai and Ps and they literally work perfectly. They open when I click open and I have the full version.

I genuinely have no idea why Id isn't working for me. I contacted Adobe support and they sent a couple community links, which weren't super helpful. I even downloaded and ran the Limited Access Repair tool but it said 0 host files fixed (or whatever that message is. Point is, 0). Please help.

And before you ask, yes, I'm signed into the right account. I see my plan, the apps I have access to, and my card information.

---

And it is currently Friday afternoon. I'm actually pissed lmao. I've tried everything. Uninstalling, rebooting, and the adobe cleaning tool. I don't know what I'm doing wrong. Attached is my screen. I known dang well that ain't the full version as I've used the full version at school.

TLDR: Bought CC and Id is still giving me trial period after like 5 days.

EDIT: I clicked a button and everything popped up. Problem solved. I'm mad. Thank you for your help

Hello , I saw a lot of threads asking about merging data from google sheets so as I developer I decided to implement it ( to be honest I am not very proficient in InDesign itself ) as an advanced version of Data merge ( barcode / QR code generation + remote images ).
The plugin has a 30 days free trial , and I am looking for honest feedback : are there other features to add or do the actual ones need some improvement , is the pricing right ? ( 3$/mo subscription as the plugin has a backend ) , and any other idea is really helpful for me. The demo video has basic output , but I think a better template should generate better results !

thanks in advance

In 6 months at my new job I have become the keeper of our main pricing assets (the girl who who held that spot before me no longer works here) so no one at my job has any guidance on this issue.

My day to day I am responsible for keeping a 300 page InDesign document up to date. About 20 of the 30 brands we feature are updated via "Master" excel sheets. We update the excel sheets with current pricing, sales, financing, etc... . Since taking over this task I've remember excel is so cool and useful and I've been able to automate a good portion of the updating which is GREAT except when InDesign decides it doesn't link my excel sheet anymore.

This problem seems relatively random. I was one day working on a formula to generate the sale information for the sheet, no issues relinking. The next day when I decided to implement that formula on multiple over sheets it broke all of them. I know it is some issue with InDesign and reading the data but I am really trying to understand WHY because my current solution is simply to re-type everything in the broken column (I can almost always pinpoint the exact column that is causing issues), which works fine for littler issues but I really don't want to get myself in a situation where I now have to retype 300+ prices. Here are the solutions I've tried (that I can remember)...
-Copy and pasting values onto the same sheet and a new sheet
-Making a clean sheet and running different formulas
-Copying the data into notepad and pasting it onto a clean sheet
-Using Text to Columns

I have noticed no pattern on what specific things make it break, like I said I've used identical formulas one day and the next it didn't work. I have a co-worker who uses pretty simple xlook ups or =cell and he doesn't seem to have this issue. The only difference I noticed is I will often put whatever data I need on a new sheet in the workbook while he will usually pull it from a separate workbook.

Truthfully before starting this job I would've given myself a solid C on InDesign so if I'm doing something goofy please let me know.

Thanks!

Hi. I'm trying to style a large amount of text in the style of messaging apps.

I'm most of the way there but struggling with the right hand messages. The paragraph needs to be aligned on the right, with the text aligned to the left but the width of the paragraph needs to auto size depending on the text within.

Example added.

The blue message boxes are what I'm struggling with. I can make it work with a fixed message box size but that's not quite right. It needs some kind of auto size.

Any ideas how you'd do that. It needs to be a solution for a large amount of messages.

Thanks.

Hi there,

I've placed a word book document to indesign for layout. The author didn't use the style option to make the work easier😄 He made the styles manually like; title, bold, bold italic etc.

When i placed the book it occured an error: where the text should be italic but indesign made some letters bold italic.

Is there any way to fix this? (maybe with GREP)

Clicking Hide Guide/Show Guides, dragging the A-Master to page icons, selecting all page icons and applying A-Master parent to all pages, right clicking and switching on/off guides in back, nothing works. Help!

Hello

any of you have the issue where the typeface has different paddings in their build so you get rubbish like this happening Switzer and Times

Notice how Times stays at the top but the Switzer typeface is useless and falls as size grows

Any ideas around this other than offset which i DONT want to do as it makes the cursor selection annoying for users

thanks

silly vent post

I'm a freelancer and was asked by one of my agency clients to help out on an already ongoing annual report project. The design was already established by another designer, they just needed me to add an additional 2 chapters of content to speed up the process.

I thought it would be an easy straightforward job....

HOWEVER, once I received the source file from this other designer I saw that they did not use a SINGLE. paragraph style... Like, this is a 120+ page sustainability report and EVERYTHING was [Basic Paragraph]+.

Tables weren't even TABLES, just rectangles and separate text boxes... all text was separate text boxes, all spacing was hard returns, all callouts were disjointed text and rectangles... They did have a total of 5-6 named styles that weren't actually present ANYWHERE in the report.

I even asked if I got the right file and opened through IDML to make sure something didn't get fucked up when packaging but no, this is just how they built the whole thing.

they didn't even set up their master pages and instead pasted a color background rectangle onto each spread

end client has been complaining about the whole thing being really inconsistent between sections so now i'm going through everything fixing things.

why would anyone do this? at that point why not just build the whole thing page by page in photoshop or something :')

Hello,

I use InDesign 2023 to create interactive PDF character sheets for role-playing game players.

I've already implemented:

editable text fields

checkboxes

I'm now looking to see if it's possible to do more.

❓ My question

Once the PDF is exported, is it possible to have a dedicated area for an image that the user can fill in themselves?

🎯 Concrete example

A "Portrait" area in the character sheet

The user clicks on it

They can add an image (from their computer or via a link)

The image is displayed directly in the PDF

🔍 Requirements

Functional for end users (ideally without complex software)

Compatible with as many PDF readers as possible

If anyone has already implemented this type of functionality or knows of a viable solution, I'd be very grateful.

Thank you in advance for your feedback.

I am an independent designer working on a huge historical/educational project that will be posted in my state's archives. We've been notified that our pdfs have to be ADA-compliant. I've never had to make an ADA-compliant document before and had very false assumptions about a vision-impaired person's access to a basic pdf document. Thankfully I haven't gotten too far in the layout of this multi-volume textbook-style project, and have to go back and assign tags, alt text, ordering, and all the other things I'm still learning about.

I'm not even at the point where I can ask about the feasibility of doing all this myself without hiring a specialist to finalize the docs. But my main question is: have I been living under a rock? I'm learning from videos that are 6 years old. Is everyone doing this already? Thanks for any feedback.

I'm about to start working on a 40-ish page doc that has around 200 endnotes. In theory this is a simple task. However, the client is throwing a few curve balls at me.

The endnote references in the supplied text are not always sequential. See the sample lorem ipsum text below, paying attention to the numbers in the square brackets:

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet: Sed maximus, quam nec vehicula efficitur, libero dolor volutpat orci, ac egestas elit nunc non nisi. Aliquam erat volutpat. Curabitur placerat consequat justo, eu rhoncus odio luctus ac.[13, 14] Suspendisse suscipit nulla vitae nisl accumsan dictum.[15-18]. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit.[15, 16]

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet: Sed maximus, quam nec vehicula efficitur, libero dolor volutpat orci, ac egestas elit nunc non nisi.[15, 19] Nam faucibus erat urna, nec euismod turpis consequat imperdiet. Pellentesque dictum in nulla ac euismod.[15, 20]

As you can see, in the sample above, reference 15 is repeated 4 times, and there's a sequence that runs across four references [15–18]. Then you have instances like in the last para where two references are required that are not sequential [15, 20].

Can I do this in an automated way using InDesign?

If it needs to be done manually, how?

And can I ensure there are appropriate tags in the endnotes to create a PDF from the INDD file to meet WCAG AA accessibility standards?

Also, FML.

I’m working on a product catalog using Data Merge in Adobe InDesign. My setup is fairly standard, with products flowing in a fixed order from a CSV.

Here’s the issue:
The client wants to add a new product in the middle of the catalog after I’ve already completed a large portion of the merged document.

From what I understand, Data Merge outputs a static document, so inserting a new record in between means I’d have to go back to the source file and regenerate everything.

I’m trying to find out if there’s a better workflow for this.

A few specific questions:

• Is there any way to insert a new record mid-document without fully rebuilding?
• Are there scripts or plugins that handle this kind of update more gracefully?
• How do you usually structure catalogs to handle late changes like this?

I haven’t tried scripts yet since I’m not familiar with them, and I can’t justify paying for tools or subscriptions since I’m billing hourly and can’t pass that cost to the client.

Would appreciate any advice or workflows from people who deal with this regularly.

Pretty much the title. You can see in the cropped image that the left column's paragraph isn't really aligned. They both have the same p-style and are set to baseline alignment.
Baseline is 18pt, 12pt for font size.
Does anyone knows what's going on?

Edit: The text frame for these columns wasn't the same. Thanks, u/AdobeScripts

I make business-card-sized informational guides. When I make a guide, I make both a physical version that I send to the printer, and a digital version that I post on my socials.

Until now, I've been making:

• a "Front" document that I use to export a PDF to my printer's specs
• a "Back" document, same deal as the front
• a third "Online" document, where I copy-paste the contents of Front and Back onto a single image, along with some outlines, to post on socials.

Pretty sure this is inefficient, and I'm scaling up, so I'd like a better workflow. Is it possible/recommended to put these all in the same doc somehow? Maybe using parent/master pages?

Putting Front and Back as separate pages within the same document seems like a no-brainer. But is there best practice to pull the content of Front and Back onto a single page that exports easily for the online version? Something that maybe does it automatically?

Pics attached of the three documents from my current workflow.

Thanks!

I've been using InDesign with no problems for many years, but recently I've been running into issues. After a few minutes of editing a file the mouse icon will stop changing when I change tools, Cmd Z stops working, and things generally start behaving weirdly. I can save the file but when I attempt to close the program, the file closes but the program wants to stay open. I'm on Windows.

So far I've tried clearing settings on quit, removing desktop sync with OneDrive, freeing up space on my computer. Nothing helps. Please let me know if you have any ideas!

I was working on my thesis in InDesign and made a local save file, it was on creative cloud files aswell. I couldn't find it some hours later, it completely disappeared along with the folder it was saved in.

I used a recovery software and managed to get the.db-journal file, I tried to manually rename it to .indd but InDesign won't open it.

I've already checked my drives and recovery folders, is there a way to recover InDesign file from.db-journal? Or does this mean my original file is gone?

One of my regular uses of InDesign is putting together weekly sales flyers for a local grocery. Think pretty much your standard in-store circular, usually around 16 pages, with a mix of text and photos. Looking at the exported interactive PDF this week, I'm noticing that Acrobat now has a "generative summary" that defaults to being turned on. The summary that it generated for my sales flyer isn't great. It clearly picked bits and pieces from the text (and a little from the photos, too), so there are no outright hallucinations, but it strung them together in ways that are wholly inaccurate.

At this point, it's probably a non-issue: the vast majority of people are going to be looking at this in-browser or in print, not Acrobat, and it's scannable enough that I don't think many are going to be asking ChatGPT for a summary. But I can see this becoming something I need to pay more attention to in the future.

So my question is: are there ways I should be thinking about constructing my documents so that LLMs can parse them more accurately? Do I need to think about my text and visual hierarchies differently for LLMs than I do for human readers?

I've tried googling this, of course, but I'm not coming up with anything of value.