InDesign’s CS 4 (6.01) Preflight still can’t collect everything
Posted by Marco on Mar 25, 2009 in
INDD
Good colleague (Dutch InDesign trainer and speaker at my Digital-Engineer event last year) Frans reports about a bug in Adobe’s Indesign CS4 for OSX. I hadn’t noticed it because all the artwork I create using inDesign gets send out like a certified PDF. But if you send out complete InDesign ‘packages’ you need to be aware InDesign won’t collect all the links when you ‘collect for output’. So what’s up? As always, when you know what to look for the answer is simple.
Every linked file with a forward or backward slash won’t get collected and will even crash InDesign. I know… I know… you never use slashes in a file-name, right? Well neither do I. But that actually makes it even more dangerous because it’s not something I’m thinking about when I’m creating artwork and I always receive a lot of files from third parties.
Comments
#1 Olof Fredrikze | March 25, 2009 | 21:19 CET
That’s hardly a bug. Never, never, never use \ or | or / or : in filenames. Never. Or is the limited use of bitmapped fonts also a ‘bug’.
When receiving files with slashes (if they survive it trough the mail) the first thing to do is rename them. Just like the old days when you couldn’t use filenames like ‘cover_fishing.psd’ to give to your windows-using colleague without breaking the 5.3 rule. Sometimes you need a brain for your job.
#2 Marco | March 26, 2009 | 08:34 CET
Well, when you embed a preflight function in your layout app and you even extend on it wih Live Preview http://tr.im/hLlD and you let people import or place images with a slash in the document’s name it would be nice if the app flagged the image.
#3 Don Hammond | April 22, 2009 | 07:57 CET
Unfortunately the problem with the Packaging function is not limited to files with offending characters in the file names. I’ve just encountered this problem tonight, and the files that InDesign CS4 is refusing to collect have no naming problems. What’s more, the Preflight function says everything is fine, all the images show up properly in the Links palette, and even the report that you can generate when doing the Packaging says that all the links have been collected. The problem is that they’re not; a good one-third of the images are missing. Ominously, I’ve done a little digging and have found complaints from other CS4 users encountering the same thing, and it appears to be random without any explanation or reason.
thanks,
Don Hammond
#4 JIm | August 18, 2009 | 04:20 CET
I had the same problem with my files today. Only a third of the images were collected. There were no naming problems. I had to manually move files into the links folder.
#5 Cindy | April 28, 2010 | 18:29 CET
I just had the same problem! I’ve been doing this for 17 years, and I can’t remember the last time a printer had to call me for a missing link. The name is 7 letters, no slashes or spaces, nothing.
Even more distressing—I noticed that as it packaged, it made duplicate copies of links, renamed them, and then RELINKED to the copy. So I have a product photo that appears 7 times in my catalog. My ID files are all linked to the same PS file in the same place. So if I work on the photo and save it, it updates in all 7 instances. But when I packaged it, it created 7 copies of the photo, named each one _1, _2, _3, _4, _5, _6 and RELINKED my InDesign files to the new name. So NOW if my book is at the printer, and I need to resubmit this photo with edits, I’ll need to send 7 copies so it updates correctly? I can go through my package and try to throw out all the duplicates and relink to the original. But this catalog has over 600 links, and probably a third of them have been duplicated in packaging. What is it doing??
Packaging used to be the foolproof way to be sure you sent a complete set of files. It was great, it worked. What happened?
Now, not only is it not helping me do good production, it’s setting me up to make a huge mistake.
#6 Marco | April 28, 2010 | 19:02 CET
It’s quite dangerous and it will be one of the first things I’ll put to the test when I receive my copy of CS5. I’m meeting some of the Adobe folks in a few weeks and I’ll be sure to ask them about InDesign’s disturbing behavior.
What platform are you on? OSX or Windows?
#7 Nita | May 3, 2010 | 08:11 CET
I came across the same prob – only 5 links packaging out of 47- so fixed file names etc and did all as suggested on all the forums out there but nothing worked.
Until…
One of my files was being linked from my backup drive that Time Machine uses. Once I replaced the file using the file from my actual harddrive, it packaged! (Don’t ask me how I placed the file off of the backup drive in the first place – I have no idea)
Hope this solves the problem for some!
#8 Cindy | May 3, 2010 | 17:26 CET
Marco, I’m on OSX. Thank you for bringing this issue up with those guys. It’s never been a problem before. For the most part I love InDesign, but yikes!
And Nita, that’s really interesting. I’m freelancing at an apparel company, and all the assets are kept on a central server, for version control. There’s a team of us, so that way we’re working on different catalogs, we all know we’re drawing from the same assets. So nothing is on my hard drive until I’m ready to send it out. At that point I package it to my desktop and burn a DVD. Which is when I had this problem.
They’ve had this workflow for years and it keeps things super organized, so I really hope it isn’t a problem with InDesign and external servers!
I do other jobs from home, and on those I’m working directly from my hard drive, and I don’t seem to have this issue packaging things to go out. Weird.
#9 Marco | May 3, 2010 | 21:42 CET
Thanks for the feedback. I’m meeting Adobe at the CS5 Roadshow the 18th. I’ll let them read your comments and let you know.
#10 film izle | May 11, 2010 | 10:52 CET
I do other jobs from home, and on those I’m working directly from my hard drive, and I don’t seem to have this issue packaging things to go out. Weird.