Tagged: bug

Adobe’s unwelcome Welcome screen

Illustrator / InDesign
13 Jul, 2015

Hey Adobe, see that button down there in the lower right corner of your highly-annoying Welcome screen that pops up every time I launch InDesign CC 2015—the one that says “Don’t Show Welcome Screen Again?” How about you fix whatever bug that tells the app to ignore the fact that I clicked that button the last time I launched the app, EVERY TIME I LAUNCH THE APP!!!

When you do manage to fix the bug, please share your findings with the Illustrator team, because it happens every time I launch that app as well.

To be fair, this only happens on two out of the three Macs I use on a regular basis. But all three Macs have exactly the same software installed, and are running the same OS versions.

Fixing the grid alignment bug in Adobe Illustrator

Illustrator
28 Feb, 2013

Illustrator alignment bug

Have you come across this little gem of a bug when using Adobe Illustrator? You draw a box and apply a stroke to the inside of the frame, and the stroke appears to “float” off of the frame itself. As you can see in the image above, the actual frame object is the blue line, and my 1-pixel black stroke is way off. The bug has been around for a few years, and I’m not sure why Adobe hasn’t fixed it yet. Fortunately, the solution below fixes the problem.

When creating your document, click the Advanced tab at the bottom of the New Document dialog box. Untick the Align New Objects to Pixel Grid checkbox.

iPhone photos appearing sideways when you display them on the computer? You’re holding it wrong!

General
5 Mar, 2012

iPhone: You're holding it wrong

If you use your iPhone to take photos and import them onto your computer or send them via email, you may have come across an issue where the photos display sideways or upside down on the computer or the recipient’s email. It’s frustrating for most users because they’re not sure why it’s happening. The reality is that there’s nothing wrong with your phone.

If Steve Jobs were alive today, he would simply tell you that “you’re holding it wrong!”

The iPhone supports an Orientation Tag in the image EXIF data under iOS 4 and above. It stores the information that tells the display the device what direction the photo was taken and how to display it properly. The problem is that most software doesn’t implement the Orientation Tag.

Until all Windows and Mac developers update their software to read the Orientation Tag, the solution is to make sure that you hold your iPhone with the home button either at the bottom for portrait photos, or to the right for landscape shots.

Avoid unwanted “bold type” and odd, shaded boxes in your InDesign document

InDesign
6 Jun, 2007

You may have come across a situation when you print or make a PDF in Adobe InDesign where some of your type appears bolder than the rest of the text – and it’s not because you wanted it that way. Here’s a brief explanation of what’s going on. When you use transparency in your document, either by placing a layered PSD file, using glow or drop shadow effects or setting an object’s transparency to something other than 100% Normal, AND that object is on TOP of your text, the file is “flattened” when you print or export to PDF. Flattening is essentially rasterizing or outlining the text which interact with the transparency area. You can adjust the settings in your preferences, but you cannot avoid the process. This can sometimes make the text appear bolder than text that is not underneath the immediate area of the transparenct object.

To avoid this flattening issue, simply make sure that your text is either on top of any objects using transparency, or on a layer which is higher up in the layer order than the layer containing the transparency.

Along the same lines, you may also notice that sometimes your document looks fine in InDesign, but when you print or export, some objects have a slightly lighter box around them, almost like a bounding box. This can occur when you place an image that is in the RGB color space into your CMYK-based InDesign document. This is especially noticeable if you place a layered PSD file on a CMYK background in InDesign and the image you place either has edges that don’t meet the frame edges in the object container (such as a circular image placed in a square frame). It can also happen if you place a colored image as your background of the entire page in InDesign. You won’t notice it when you export or print unless you set a drop shadow (or some other form of transparency) in your InDesign document on top of the RGB background. The solution is simple. Make sure your Photoshop images are all CMYK.