One of my pet peeves is that I have to clear all the fields in the STEP AND REPEAT dialouge box before I can begin entering information. I have been patiently waiting for this bug to be fixed. I am beginning to wonder if Adobe is even aware of the bug? It drives me nuts to no end!!! I am sure it is responsible for several points in my blood pressure reading on given days. I'll have an object selected that I need to step 7 times and I'll bring up the Step and Repeat dialouge box. I'll enter 7 in the COUNT field. InDesign will in some cases immediately flag the operation as not possible because there are numbers in the other two fields that I haven't had a chance to edit yet that will cause the step and repeat operation to go off the pasteboard. It makes me MAD because it changes my 7 back to a 1 and I have to go and put in the correct values for the VERTICAL and HORIZONTAL offset fields and then I have to go back up to the COUNT field and re-enter my 7. All of this and I haven't even hit the O.K. button yet!!! Can someone at Adobe pleeeeeeaaaaaase inform the programmers of this glitch and have them move the MATH CHECK to AFTER THE O.K. BUTTON is clicked! I wouldn't mind the message if the figures I entered were incorrect and I had hit the O.K. button. But it drives me absolutely insane when it starts trying to correct me before I've even finished entering my values!
Am I the only one?
I would love to hear from anyone else out there that gets frustrated from this. If for no other reason then to let me know I haven't completely lost my sanity yet.
Thanks.
Randy
No, you are not alone. Squeaky wheels get more attention, so fill out the form at Adobe - Feature Request/Bug Report Form
It will be more effective as a FEATURE request than a bug, in this case, I suspect because you are looking to modify existing behavior.
Thank you Peter. I will do as you suggest although I cannot for the life of me understand how anyone can get away with saying it is not a bug. Yes, I want to modify the current behaviour but only because the program attempts to calculate the values in the dialouge box BEFORE it is supposed to!!! That is a BUG!!! But if calling it a NEW FEATURE will get it fixed I will request it.
Randy
Thanks Michael. I'll let you know when it comes through. I couldn't imagine I was the only one bothered by it but I would have thought that by now it would be fixed. I did post about it several years back and kept hoping each time a new version came out that it would be resolved.
Randy
I have a bunch of long-standing pet peeves. Why, for example, does the New Document dialog box not show column width fields? Why does the Table of Contents Save a Style call it a style; not a preset? It is called a preset in some 20 other places. Why is their no epub workspace? Why are the justification settings set so painfully conservatively in the Basic Paragraph style? Why are those traditional Swatch colors always there at default in the Swatch panel. You almost never use them. But the Character Styles panel, a much more useful moment, is not pre-stocked with Bold and Italic character styles--something you would tend to use all the time! Why is the Hyperlinks panel so obtuse with its Shared switch defaulting to On? Why is the Drop Shadow always starting at 75% Opacity? Why can't we get endnotes/footnotes right?I could go on and on.
I wish the Adobe InDesign folks would launch a Just-Do-It campaign for InDesign, as was done a couple of years ago for Photoshop. Little things fixed; not new features added on.
There are other cases in the same direction:
If you want to move (copy) page 1 from document A (1 page) after page 1 in document B (2 pages) and you use the "Move Pages" feature in the pages panel, the target input field is greyed out, because the default target document is the current active document, that holds only 1 single page.
You first have to define the target document (document B in this case) and then the page position (after page 1) you want to.
And to make insanity perfect, you can check "Delete Pages After Moving". But that is simply impossible, because you cannot delete page 1 of a one-page document
. And of course, you'll get the appropriate alarm message and you are nearly back to square one.
Uwe
Wow! I guess I should consider myself fortunate that I don't have nearly as many. However, I thought you could set up your color palette and other palettes to have your own custom default values and InDesign would remember them. Or am I remembering that from PageMaker? Maybe someone who knows can jump in and help me out. It's been awhile but I thought if you changed the values while a document was not open then it would somehow remember those. I'm not 100% sure because I know there are some things you can't change unless you do have a document open.
Randy
O.K. Peter. I did go and file a report. I couldn't bring myself though to call it a feature request because I clearly believe it is a bug. A co-worker of mine and I had a long discussion about it. He argued your side of things suggesting that the program was working as the programmers intended for it to be and because of that I couldn't call it a bug. But, I contend that the program IS NOT working as the programmers intended for it to be because if you look at the OBJECT > TRANSFORM > MOVE item in InDesign it also brings up a dialogue box. This dialogue box also has a PREVIEW check box on it. If the PREVIEW check box is checked then it immediately evaluates the numbers as you enter them into the various fields. And if you enter an invalid number it will immediately present the error message. However, if the PREVIEW check box is left unchecked then it waits until you press the O.K. Button before evaluating the numbers and executing the move. The STEP AND REPEAT dialogue box should behave the same way but it doesn't. It behaves as if the PREVIEW check box is checked whether it is or not. So that is a BUG in my humble opinion.
Thanks for your help in pointing me to the correct form. I'm usually so busy working that I never have time to look that kind of stuff up.
Randy
I know it seems counter-intuitive, and that it appears to be a bug, but if the program is actually performing "as designed" then a bug report will be assigned a "not a bug" status and get no further action. On the other hand, a request to modify an existing feature may get bumped up the ladder.
O.K. I hear you Peter. And based on this I may go ahead and submit a second request as you suggested. But am I the only one that sees a dialogue box behaving differently then all the other dialogue boxes in the program as a bug? It does not behave like the other dialogue boxes. It behaves as if the preview box is checked whether it is or not. That seems wrong to me.
O.K. I submitted it as a feature request. I hear what everyone is saying about the difference between the two. I'm still not totally convinced I'm wrong but I am willing to put that aside to reach the end goal. I just want the lousy Step & Repeat Dialogue box to let me finish filling in the figures before it tries to tell me I can't do it! And for those who want instant evalation of the figures they can check the PREVIEW box to attain that behaviour.
My work here is done.
Randy
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