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Blue Velvet

Moderator emeritus
Original poster
Jul 4, 2004
21,929
265
Ahhhhhh... feck it.

For months I've defended this sorry excuse against all attacks, even as impressed as I am with InDesign. But today, my patience is just about at breaking point especially as those wankers want £259 per license to upgrade from 6.5 to v7.

I'm working on a 180pp book, two spot colours only, full of charts and tables. And no matter how I work it, the tables are absolutely awful. The table rules keep dropping out in different sections of the tables... having spent the best part of Friday last week carefully checking and marking up separations for every spread, I now find inconsistent weights all over the place despite everything set to 0.3pt.

Have run it through everything I can think of. Saving the pages as EPSs and PDFs, still the same problem. They look rubbish on screen, they won't print properly on a number of different printers... consistently inconsistent. Have also triple-checked object-level and global trapping many times on all chapters... and of course, I can't even collect an entire book for output let alone print it, having to do it chapter by chapter.

Meanwhile, almost simultaneously, my colleague suffers the 'unexpected end-of-file' error on a 2-day job.

Absolutely criminal. Roll on CS3.
 
I must say that I'm quite surprised to read this from you, BV. I read the title (from the main page, where it doesn't say who started the thread) and thought, BV will be there in a minute to clear up any problems the user is having. :)

To be really honest, I'm not a huge fan of the way that ID handles tables either. It seems like they are all very unintuitive and really make things harder than they have to be, regardless of the program. Everytime I must use one, I'm half tempted to just draw in the lines myself, and use tabs to set up the "table" in a regular text box.

There's got to be a better way. Some kind of Excel integration would be my ideal.

I can't really offer much more than a "good luck," but I'll offer it nonetheless.

Goodluck, BV.
 
Now normally, I would do the tables in InDesign and drop them as PDFs or EPSs. Its implementation is far superior but more importantly: it outputs correctly.

But this time, the 1st proofs were done by a freelancer and I haven't got time to redo all the tables as it's supposed to be signed off and going to press tomorrow. It's almost 7pm and I'm about to be kicked out of the office by the cleaner so this'll be rushed through tomorrow morning for sign-off.

Oh, and there is Excel integration of sorts; you can link to tables. But its flaky.

This is the kind of project where I can't afford to be effing around. I'm not looking for artistic bells and whistles, just reliability. And if a piece of production software that costs this much can't deliver, then its days are numbered here in this studio.

[/febrile rant]
 
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