Adobe Community: What is the safest way to convert a CS5.5 file to CS6?

Currently Being Moderated

1. Alec Molloy,

Jul 10, 2012 1:46 PM in reply to Shane Romeo

Report

There shouldn't be any information loss when converting from CS5.5 to CS6. You can just open up the CS5.5 file up in CS6 without converting it.

Going back to 5.5 you will have to convert to IDML, which can result in degradation of your document. Can you provide an example of what information you are losing? Screenshots would help.

|

Mark as:

Currently Being Moderated

2. Shane Romeo,

Jul 10, 2012 2:15 PM in reply to Alec Molloy

Report

Due to the privacy agreement with the client, I can't provide screenshots. The issue was that some row headers were lost from a table when the file was brought into CS6, but I know that no information should be lost when opening a 5.5 file in 6. So far, it's only happened once, so I don't know if it was just a fluke. However, for the future, is there an efficient way to compare files for consistency issues?

|

Mark as:

Currently Being Moderated

3. Peter Spier,

Jul 10, 2012 2:30 PM in reply to Shane Romeo

Report

The fastest way I know to compare files is to print them and throw them on the light table on on top of the other and look for ghosts that shouldn't be there. Acrobat has a compare feature for PDFs, but I've never figured out how to make it work.

The file that lost info, did you open from .indd or from .idml?

|

Mark as:

Currently Being Moderated

4. Shane Romeo,

Jul 10, 2012 2:42 PM in reply to Peter Spier

Report

The file that lost the information was a CS5.5 .INDD file opened with CS6, which is weird. And I'll look into the Acrobat compare feature since comparing hundreds of pages on a light table could get cumbersome.

|

Mark as:

Currently Being Moderated

5. Peter Spier,

Jul 10, 2012 2:55 PM in reply to Shane Romeo

Report

Since CS5 I've made it policy to open either .inx or .idml exported from the original version when updating. I never had any troouble with my own files, but other users started reporting strange things (like this) or late stage catastrophic failures with CS3 and CS4 .indd file opened directly in CS5. The export route seemed to solve them almost uninversally, and it just seems like good insurance for the small amount of effort involved.

|

Mark as:

Currently Being Moderated

6. David W. Goodrich,

Jul 10, 2012 8:12 PM in reply to Shane Romeo

Report

I've found Acrobat Pro's document compare feature very useful for some jobs, and irritating for others. One of its modes amounts to light-tabling the two documents, but I usually want a text compare, most recently of a 450-pp. book, where the 250-pp. max. meant I had to do it in two chunks. Acrobat 9 seems happier with more RAM: I learned not to approach the 250-pp. max on my Vista64 machine with 8 GB, but the package seems more reliable on my Win7 machine with 16 GB. It often generates quite a few false positives, which take getting used to. Versions 7 and 8, if I recall correctly, would place the pages side-by-side, which I prefer; version 9 can still be made to do this, I'm note sure about X.

|

Mark as:

Currently Being Moderated

7. Bob Levine,

Jul 11, 2012 1:18 AM in reply to Shane Romeo

Report

Do these tables have links to external sources? A new features in CS6 was to keep header rows when relinking tables.

I wonder if this is connected to that feature.

Bob

|

Mark as:

Currently Being Moderated

8. Shane Romeo,

Jul 11, 2012 6:08 AM in reply to Bob Levine

Report

Maybe it's the links? The tables are made up of placed Excel documents. Either way, it seems like figuring out the compare feature in Adobe is the best way to go. Thanks!

|

Mark as:

Currently Being Moderated

9. Bob Levine,

Jul 11, 2012 6:12 AM in reply to Shane Romeo

Report

One way to test would be to kill those links by embedding the tables and then opening the files.

If that works, I think you may have stumbled on a bug.

Bob

|

Mark as:

Currently Being Moderated

10. David W. Goodrich,

Jul 19, 2012 3:23 PM in reply to Shane Romeo

Report

Late again I'm afraid, but while looking for another JSX file I bumped into a means for directly comparing ID files, without first generating PDFs for Acrobat Pro to compare: Kasyan Servetsky's script "Compare Two Documents" is described in a 2009 post over at InDesignSecrets.com. I've never tried it, but it might provide a different answer to the original OP's question:

is there a way to compare either the .INDD/.IDML files or the exported .PDFs without having to go line-by-line on every page?

David

|

Mark as:

Currently Being Moderated

11. Bo LeBeau,

Jul 19, 2012 5:34 PM in reply to David W. Goodrich

Report

Wow, that script works great! Even though it was written for earlier versions of InDesign it works flawlessly in CS5.

Kasyan even provides 2 sample documents to compare (separate download from the .jsx script)

|

Mark as:

Currently Being Moderated

12. mclaud_it,

Feb 6, 2013 4:32 AM in reply to Shane Romeo

Report

Did you try to convert troughout the idml export procedure as suggested by Peter?

I'm having issues with some Cs5 documents opening directly into Cs6 and I'd like to know if you have found a solution.

|

Mark as:

InDesign

What is the safest way to convert a CS5.5 file to CS6?

Jul 10, 2012 1:37 PM

More Like This

Bookmarked By (0)

Answers + Points = Status