InDesign CS3 & Mac OSX 10.5 “Leopard”: The Good, The Bad & The Not-Too-Shabby

A while back I was ranting about the myriad issues I had been reading about concerning Adobe InDesign CS3 and Apple’s (then) new operating system Mac OSX 10.5 “Leopard”. I am happy to report that upon upgrading to 10.5, and using InDesign CS3, everything has been working (for the most part) just great.

Actually, the Adobe issues began with 10.5 and Acrobat Professional. There was an issue with the print function, but this was something Adobe recognize and blatantly acknowledged would be fixed in late January 2008 — and indeed it was. But other, more sinister issues were lurking in the shadows, preying on InDesign CS3 — issues with placing objects, using the open/save dialog boxes. Yikes. Issues with placing objects in InDesign is pretty much a deal-killer, no?

Turns out the Adobe InDesign team was aware of, and working on, the issues. Only problem is that they weren’t exactly sure what the problem was, although they had it narrowed down to some degree. From what I can gather over at Tim Cole’s InDesign Back Channel blog, the issues are still not fixed but anticipated to be resolved shortly.

As I recently upgraded to a awesome new MacPro, I had no choice but to move to Leopard. I was a bit hesitant about doing so, but a friend was looking to buy my old G4, and I just couldn’t pass up the opportunity to offset (some of) the cost of a new machine. As I mentioned above, for the most part things have been just fine.

There are some issues however; another non-critical issue with InDesign not respecting the “hide” menu command has reared it head. Not a big deal as it doesn’t affect workflow. And ever since I activated 10.5’s new “Spaces” (multiple virtual desktops) feature, I sometimes lose all my palettes, requiring an old-fashioned ‘tab’ keystroke (twice in this case) to bring them back. And this happens in Illustrator as well. I have read that Adobe is aware of this issue as well. Kind of annoying, but Spaces, at least on main work machine, is losing favor with me anyways.

I still believe, at least as of the date of this post, that the user should be aware and cautious when upgrading to Leopard if one is a CS3 user.

by George Coghill -
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