InDesign: Aligning by nudging, despite fractional units

When aligning selected objects in InDesign, you can nudge them by pressing the arrow keys. In some cases it can be impossible to use the arrow keys to align two objects when either object’s position is a fractional unit, such as an X position of 124.582 points. If the second object is positioned at 124 or 124.839 points, nudging it won’t line it up with 124.582 points because each arrow key nudge is one whole point from its original position.

If you just want the two objects to line up with each other, and you don’t care what the numbers are, select both objects and use the align buttons, which you can find on the Align palette and the Control palette. If you want to get rid of the fractional units but still nudge with the arrow keys, try these other two methods:

  • To nudge to grid increments, enable View > Snap to Grid.
  • To nudge by a single whole unit of measure, first click in the X or Y field in the Control palette, and then press the up arrow and down arrow keys. When a number field is active in the Control palette, nudging snaps the field’s value to the nearest whole number.

Both techniques are slightly different ways to easily nudge object after object to the same absolute, non-fractional position.

Stuttering video playback on PowerBooks and iBooks

If you experience stuttering, jerky video playback on an Apple PowerBook or iBook, here are some ideas.

Check Energy Saver settings. Open your System Preferences and click Energy Saver. In Energy Saver, click the Options tab. Now check the setting for Processor Performance. If it’s set to Reduced, change it to Highest or Automatic. Video playback may be smooth now.

If you’re running on battery, be sure to change the Processor Performance setting back to Automatic or Reduced when you’re done watching video. The Highest setting drains the battery the fastest. Note that on a notebook, the Energy Saver preference lets you save different settings for Battery and Power Adapter.

You might see the effect of the Reduced setting any time you perform processor-intensive tasks such as audio or video rendering, or gameplay. In those situations, you’ll want to set Processor Performance to Automatic or Highest.

Note: The Energy Saver tip won’t work with MacBooks and MacBook Pros, because Intel CPUs automatically try to balance smooth playback against battery drain. The older PowerPC CPUs were not as smart.

Check for other processor hogs. If you set Processor Performance to Highest and you still see choppy performance, the cause may be another application that’s using processor cycles. Open your Activity Monitor utility, view the CPU tab, show all processes, and sort the list by %CPU to see if any applications are using an unusually high percentage of CPU cycles. While new computers can handle today’s streaming video easily, the same video demands almost all the CPU power available in older computers, so any unnecessary tasks can interrupt smooth video playback.

Watch out for HD video. If you have a PowerBook or iBook, you’ll probably have to avoid HD and choose the SD (standard definition) option when you watch Internet video. Smooth HD streaming works best with a recent Intel multi-core CPU. When PowerBooks and iBooks were made, Internet video was much lower quality and there was no high-definition streaming. As CPUs got faster, what made high-quality HD streaming possible were new codecs that made up for limited Internet bandwidth by leaning on the CPU in your computer to process the highly compressed stream. Newer Intel CPUs are optimized for those codecs, so they can decompress video files and Web streaming video very quickly without slowing down the whole computer.

But the G3 and G4 CPUs in PowerBooks and iBooks do not have those Intel optimizations (PowerPC G3 and G4 CPUs were not made by Intel), so they are are too old and slow to decode HD without stuttering. A PowerBook G4 might have a CPU running at 1GHz, while a MacBook Pro has multiple multimedia-optimized CPU cores running at over 2GHz each. Even an old, used MacBook Pro has many times the processing power of a PowerBook G3 or G4.

Also, check the speed of your connection to the Internet. You need a fast enough connection to stream HD smoothly. My old Internet connection was too slow for HD streaming, forcing me to watch SD streaming even on my newest Mac, or let HD video buffer longer before I play it back. My current Internet connection is capable of carrying HD video data fast enough for smooth playback on a computer that’s fast enough to decode it.

Acrobat: Select multiple comments

Note: The following behavior is what I’ve seen in Acrobat 7 and 8 on Mac OS X. I’m not sure if it works better in the Windows versions of Acrobat. Also, this technique may not apply in Acrobat X and later because the comment list interface is slightly different.

You can select multiple comments in the Comments panel in Acrobat, but not in the way you’d expect. Let’s say you want to set the status of three comments to “Completed.” Your natural inclination would be to Shift-click or Command-click them, but it somehow doesn’t work like it does in other programs: even though you’re holding down a modifier key, the only comment selected is the last one you clicked.

To select multiple comments, you need to click just below the top edge of each comment while holding down a modifier key. For example, to select a range of comments, click the first comment you want to select, and then Shift-click just below the top edge of the last comment you want to select. It might take a little practice, but you’ll get it.

Mysterious application failures caused by delocalization

OS X supports a large number of world languages, but if you only understand one language, you’re hauling around many megabytes of files you don’t need. Many Mac users try to free up some disk space by using a utility that removes versions of files for languages they don’t want. This has given rise to a class of utilities that hunt down and delete all the files for specified languages. Some of these utilities are:
Delocalizer [Note: This software appears to be discontinued. (June 2011) ]
Macaroni
Monolingual
Youpi Optimizer  [Note: This link is now dead. (June 2011) ]

Nearly all of my applications run fine after delocalization, but there are a few that don’t like to have their localized resources deleted, and they refuse to run without them. These applications might not display a specific error message for this, so all you see is a general error message that leaves you guessing.

The applications that I know about that don’t like to be delocalized are:
Adobe Illustrator CS2 (the 12.0.1 updater fails to install the update)
Adobe Acrobat 7 (Macaroni users update to Macaroni 2.0.6 or later)
Adobe Acrobat 8 (application will not launch, says “A required component was not found.”)

(NOTE: Macaroni 2.0.8 is now available, and according to its release notes, it will no longer delocalize any Adobe applications. This should prevent future Macaroni delocalization problems with Adobe apps.)

If you run a delocalizer and those applications or their updaters stop working, you must reinstall the application. Then you have a choice: Either see if your delocalizer utility has a way to exclude specific applications (a whitelist), or don’t delocalize again. Read on for why that second option might be realistic.

Nobody likes to have something not work, especially if it’s just one pesky app that breaks after delocalization when all the other apps are fine. And delocalization can benefit users with small hard disks. But you may not need to delocalize if you have an up-to-date computer. Today’s hard drives, now typically 250GB and up even on notebooks, are so large that a hundred or so megabytes of localized files are unlikely to be the major cause of a full hard drive. If your Mac hard drive is filling up, you’ll probably get a lot further by moving unneeded movies, photos, and music to another drive. One hour of miniDV format video from is around 13GB, many times larger than all your localized files. Also, the digital audio and graphics samples that come with multimedia applications such as GarageBand, Apple Soundtrack, and Apple LiveType take up several gigabytes on their own, so you might want to clean house there unless you need those samples.

Why would an application fail after delocalization? In many cases an application will use a checksum to verify its integrity. It knows what its file size was when originally installed, and if it notices that there’s a discrepancy the next time it launches (because you removed stuff), it won’t run. It does this because a size discrepancy can indicate that the application code has become corrupted or that malware has infected and modified the application for its own nefarious purposes. Those are some of the reasons why an application may be built to be extremely suspicious when its size changes, to the point of shutting itself down. The developer wants to make sure that the application won’t do any damage to your files.

Bridge CS2: Renaming files with the keyboard, whether you meant to or not…

To rename a selected file or folder in Adobe Bridge CS2 without using the mouse, press the spacebar, type the name, and then press Return or Enter. (For Bridge CS3 and later, see the note at the end of this post.)

If you pressed the spacebar without intending to change the filename of the selected file, your next keystroke will accidentally change the filename, and it will become permanent as soon as you click anywhere else. Once a new filename is committed, you can’t undo it. This can be a disaster if you never realize you renamed a file that was selected, and you go looking for it later without knowing that it’s under a new name. If you suddenly realize you’ve entered filename editing mode by accident, immediately press the Esc key to escape that mode without changing the original filename.

Pressing the spacebar to rename may not be intuitive if you’re used to pressing Return on Mac OS X to rename a file, but in Bridge, the Return key is already taken: it opens the file in the default editor for its file type. That use of the Return/Enter key is consistent with Windows.

Why would anyone have a reason to press the spacebar in a file browser other than to rename a file? Sometimes it’s because of the habits people pick up in other programs. Some people press the spacebar to get to the top of an alphabetical list, and others are used to pressing the spacebar in other Adobe applications to get a hand tool to pan a document in a window.

Note: In Bridge CS3, accidental renaming is much less likely because the renaming shortcut was changed to the F2 key. You can still click the filename after the file is selected; just don’t double-click the file or you’ll open it.