Help me, Straight Dope Kenobi; you’re my only hope!
One department in my company uses InDesign CS3 on Mac to create a document that later gets opened on our CS3 PC machines for additional work. But when the document is opened on our PCs, strokes appear to be randomly added to text and picture frames that were not there originally. What is going on here? I couldn’t find anything on Google or Adobe’s web site about this.
How are the documents being stored?
I’ve heard of really obscure network and server issues than can cause problems like this.
Additional info that I forgot in the OP: the strokes are added when the content from the original document is copied and then pasted into a new document. The original document opens fine.
Even Adobeware as late as CS3 is not absolutely transparently portable between the platforms.
I’d bet that there is a specific, avoidable cause - such as having a colored stroke with a width of 0 - that is causing the mistranslations. Look very closely at the specific examples on both platforms.
The text portion of the problem sounds like a style definition thing. If your new document has a character or paragraph style with the same name as one applied to the pasted text, but with differing properties, ID will use the definition in the destination document. This could lead to changes when copy-pasting.
The same could happen to frames with object styles, but I don’t think those were a CS3 feature.
You might try trashing your preferences before creating the new document to paste into.
I don’t know what’s causing your problem, but you might want to upgrade. CS3 is six years obsolete. How recent is the software in the PCs?
Upgrading is a corporate decision that is out of my hands, unfortunately.
If the original opens fine on the PC, I would immediately Save As from the PC version in the PC file format and see if the lines are now saved in the new format. If not I would continue with Copy Paste from there.
Well, if they want to upgrade at all, they’d better do it soon. When CS7, er, I mean, CC, comes out in June, it’ll be rentalware only.
There will be copies of 5.5 and 6 available for a while.