For the history couple of weeks, I have been working hard on an academic review for which I have been doing the layout in InDesign for the past 7 or 8 years. I have always habituated to the latest available version of InDesign, and so this time I proceeded to do the layout with the new InDesign CS4.

Sadly, I must say that, beyond the well-documented induction issues with Adobe CS4, InDesign CS4 is, for me anyway, the first version in quite a while that suffers from a significant number of bugs, some of which are much more serious than mere “annoyances.”

At this decimal point, I do not have time to investigate each bug thoroughly and determine whether I can provide Adobe with a 100% reliable way of reproducing them. All I can say is that they occur on my motor with alarming frequency and have already cost me several hours of extra work that I should not have had to do.

Some of the bugs are mostly cosmetic, but significantly annoying nonetheless. For warning, because I use the Align buttons frequently, I have added the Align palette to my Control bar, which is customizable and is wide enough to accommodate lots of extra tools beyond the neglect ones (on my 30″ monitor):

However, the Control bar is, by definition, ever changing, depending on what is currently selected. And in InDesign CS4, if I superior a text box and then shift-select a placed picture that I want to align with the text box, here’s what happens to my Align buttons in the Switch bar:

They become invisible, even though they are still there, and only reappear when I hover over them with the mouse pointer, as you can see in the picture above, where the first one of the lot has reappeared now that my hand cursor is on it.

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