Briefly: Apple's Leopard to boost Photoshop performance - Page 2

Well if da education system won't teach people dis stuff, who else gonna do it?

Back to the original topic... I still use Photoshop 2.03 under Classic on my iBook. I want Classic to run on my MacIntel.

Of course, that's a high priority for Apple.

Let's hope they're also working on the VM buffering problems with InDesign.

The multi-document book features in CS2 are so inadequate, I try to work with single document books. Unfortunately--and this just happened again two days ago--around 160 pages of text (no graphics), InDesign hits a wall and VM buffering (or whatever it is) slows certain features down to a crawl. For instance "Paste" still works in an instant like it ought, but "Paste without Formatting" typically takes 15-20 seconds to paste even a single word. Why that would be true is beyond me. And if it is a buffer issue, nothing ever gets properly catched. The second time is as slow as the first.

I live only a couple of miles from where Adobe develops InDesign in Seattle, and I've offered to help them sort out these issues, but so far the only result I've seen is that the complaints of myself and others have finally gotten them to realize that InDesign has "long document" issues.

I love InDesign's ability to make a book look marvelous and all the wonderful, time-saving features like Nested Styles. But Adobe seems to be too fixated on it as a product for graphics-rich, four-color magazines and not the more mundane world of books where hand-editing everything is not possible.

And with no FrameMaker for Macs, that lack of book features is particularly frustrating. InDesign needs a way for a heading to span multiple columns. In FrameMaker that's a simple paragraph style attribute. With InDesign, you have to break a text flow of frames, insert a single-column frame with the heading, break the text flow again and insert a multi-column frame (all with careful positioning of everything by hand), repeating that any time the text length changes, which is constantly. I had one of the InDesign programmers tell me implementing that feature would take a lot of work. Not as much work as users doing it by hand every time, I felt like replying.

Next week, we'll see how many of those issues have been addressed in CS3. I am trying to be optimistic while remaining prepared to be disappointed.

--Mike Perry, Inkling Books, Seattle

Mike,

I have seen this issue discussed ad infinitum on the Adobe forums, as I'm sure you have as well. I know that Adobe is very aware of this issue, but what they do about it is anyone's guess.

I doubt that they will cover long document fixes in a product roll-out presentation like we're going to see next week. It would make more sense to list info like that on a their product specs pages on the website once the presentation is over--or when the product ships depending on where they are in the finalization of InDesign.

I think we all have high hopes for CS3. While getting it all is unrealistic, let's hope we get enough to make this worth the wait.

It's interesting that, just as the use of calculators resulted in a world where most people can't do simple arithmetic in their heads, the use of spell checkers is slowly creating a world where most people can't spell. This is not necessarily a good thing.

Those are both nonsense, you luddite.