Defaults or Preferences: Open a File window size, column size

Version cue / InDesign seems to remember the last window position it was in, but it forgets the window size, and more annoyingly, the column widths always revert to the same, too narrow default. I'm always having to resize the "Name" column so I can see the full name of my files.

Is there a preference or a technique for setting the default column widths, or at least the default window size?

(Adobe CS, Mac, OS X 10.3.4)

Leif Stout

I don't know of such a preference or technique, but I wish there was one. I am having a similar problem related to relinking images. I have hundreds of images to relink in three 1000-page books, and each time I click on an image in the Links palette and click Relink, I get the Locate Image dialog (similar to an Open dialog) in Local Files mode. I have to click the Version Cue button to switch to VC mode, then navigate all the way from the top into the VC workspace, the project, documents folder, down to my file in my project to relink. And then when I go to relink the next image, I have to start from scratch and go through all those clicks again to get back to the images folder in my VC project!

It would be fantastic if someone could tell me (or if Adobe could roll this in to the next update to VC 1.0.2) how to tell the Locate Image (Relink) Open dialog box to snap back to the last place I relinked an image from, and whether I was in Version Cue mode or Local Files mode.

Glad I'm not the only one who finds this behaviour frustrating.
Does anyone else consider this an issue worth discussing?

Leif Stout

Leif, Yogi, we are aware of the dialog box resizing and column management problems. Unfortunately, there are no reliable workarounds available. If you resize the system dialog box before you switch to the VC dialog box, you may find that VC does a better job of remembering the new size (at least until you restart InDesign).

The "snapback to location" issue is slightly different. Yogi, if you have a number of images that used to be in one directory and then were copied into a VC project, and you want to "auto-relink" all of them quickly, try the following procedure:

1. synchronize the new VC directory so that there are local copies of all the images in their new location.

2. Make sure you delete the images from their old location, or at least rename the old directory so that InDesign can't find the images in the old place.

3. Open the InDesign doc that links to the images.

4. You will get the "missing links" dialog. You can do the next step either at this point by hitting the "Relink" button or by dismissing the dialog and then relinking the links from the links palette.

5. Make sure all the relocated links are selected, and choose Relink. When the first link comes up, navigate to the new VC directory where they are and select the link in its new location. At that point all the rest of the moved links will be automatically relinked to the new location.

The key points here are (i) to make sure that you have local working copies of the VC files in the new directory (use the "Synchronize" command from the VC Open dialog); and (ii) to make sure the old directory that contained the links cannot be found in its original location. The problem you are having is that InDesign remembers the full path of every linked file, and will always open the Relink dialog pointing at that old path, so unless you get rid of (or rename) that directory InDesign won't immediately search in the new directory even after you've relinked one of the images from the new one.

Hope this helps.

Dan Brotsky
VC architect
Adobe Systems