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General discussion

InDesign CS2 - Help!

Aug 21, 2007 8:04AM PDT

Hi everyone

I desperately need to get hold of a copy of InDesign CS2 - I'm doing some regular freelance work for a publisher. I sorted myself out a copy of CS3 but after doing my first lot of work, it turned out that they all use CS2.

I know you can save them as a special sort of file that can be opened in CS2 (can't remember the name right now) but that doesn't work - because I get files including text and pics, but not the images files, if I save them this way the pictures all vanish because of the missing links.

I trawled the net and managed to find a 30 day trial of CS2 which I've been happily using, thinking that I'd be able to track down a full version in that time, but I've had no luck. Now I have no program, which means no work, which is a complete disaster!

If anyone can help me out at all, or has any ideas, I would very much appreciate it - feel free to reply, send me a message or email me.

Many thanks
A very desperate (and broke!) girl

Discussion is locked

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INDesign CS2
Aug 21, 2007 10:22AM PDT

Found this through Amazon.

In Design CS2

It's not cheap though

Good Luck

P

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Well, you could always zero out your hard drive.
Aug 21, 2007 12:36PM PDT

Initializing your hard drive will take your computer back to a state where it doesn't remember ever having the trial version on it. From there, you can reinstall the trial version and use it for another 30 days.

You can buy an external hard drive, install your OS on it along with the trial version and boot off the external HD. You will again be limited to 30 days of use.

You can check on ebay... but that is a crap shoot as far as getting an actual legal copy.

Then again, if you have the CS3 version of InDesign, here are the Adobe instructions on how to...Convert earlier versions of InDesign documents

Follow the link contained in the middle of the page found at the end of this statment...

InDesign CS2 can?t open InDesign CS3 documents directly. You must update InDesign CS2 with special plug-ins and choose File > Export in InDesign CS3 to save documents in INX format before opening them in previous versions. (see Save backwards to previous InDesign versions)

Your employers will have to get the plug-ins on their end for the project to work... but if they won't be upgrading soon, they should get the plug-ins anyway. Heck, maybe you can charge them a consultant's fee for this little bit of information! Wink

Hope this helps. Happy

cheers

grim

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(NT) Did you find a solution?
Aug 23, 2007 7:00AM PDT
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Sadly not
Aug 23, 2007 12:25PM PDT

Not yet, I'm afraid.

After I read your (very helpful, thank you!) post, I hoped that asking the editor to get the plug-in might be the answer, but sadly not.

The only problem is that the pages are set up by a designer who then uploads the pages to the company server, but he keeps the original image files on his system. When I open an InDesign file, it warns me that there are missing links (ie. the original image files can't be found and therefore can't be amended) but that's not a problem, as I can still see the images, and it's only the text I'm amending.

It only becomes a problem if I try to save the file in InDesign Interchange - because I don't have the images on my computer, it strips them out of the saved version. There isn't really a way around this, as it would be too time-consuming and problematic to upload all the images for every page (not to mention, it would fill up the server too fast!).

I guess all I can do is keep an eye on eBay, or consider getting an external hard drive and installing the trial version there with OS X.

Thanks again for your help - any other ideas very much appreciated!

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InDesign keeps working files small...
Aug 23, 2007 1:47PM PDT

... by using external libraries to store bulky image files. You probably know this, and most likely know that the program is simply searching for lost or moved image files which it only want's to re-link to.

Now I hardly ever use InDesign, and have yet to use ID CS3 at all... but if there is some issue of not having the image links correctly re-linked before saving which is causing your problems, then why don't you simply get a list of all the names and duplicate the names using small thumbnails as replacement images?

Wouldn't this work, if your pages all use regular image placeholders?

As I said, I haven't used ID for so long that I'm trying to remember how it works. The easiest solution would probably be the external hard drive avenue. Besides, it never hurts to have an extra storage unit, especially if it is a portable unit. I find these invaluable for free lance work involving large multimedia files.

good luck!

grim