As a result, I try to do as little tweaking in Acrobat as possible, and I keep it very careful—adding some metadata, perhaps tweaking bookmarks and layers, but nothing major. My PDF files are important; my company makes money selling them (and distributing them far and wide via BitTorrent) and plenty of our customers love reading PDFs on their iPads.

Before I get to Acrobat, I use a specific preset to create my PDFs, developed through trial and error. To save you that time and error, you can download that preset right here:

ID to iPad PDF v1 dirtywords.tv.joboptions (It’s zipped).

A few notes about the particular settings the preset includes:

• This preset turns all the Layers in your InDesign document into Acrobat layers; so users can hide backgrounds, art boxes, etc. (depending on how you use Layers in InDesign, of course.) You can untick this if you don’t want layered documents.
• “Embed Page Thumbnails” is disabled because the thumbnails that InDesign creates are lower quality than the ones than Acrobat creates on the fly the first time it loads a PDF.
• You can safely change the PPI and Image Quality in the Compression tab. Under compression, do NOT use JPG2000 compression for anything; it doesn’t render on any current iPad PDF viewer.
• If your document includes spot colors, you probably should go to Output -> Ink Manager and tick “All Spots to Process.” (I almost never use spots, so this advice may be inadequate…)
• There are no security settings set, because I want my customers to be able to hack the documents they buy. You or your clients may feel differently.

Enjoy, and if you find this PDF particularly useful (or have any issues with it!) please let me know.

The plugin is compatible with InDesign CS4 and CS5, but if you have both versions installed on your computer, the installer will only install it for CS5; there is no way to tell the installer to install it for CS4, instead.

You can get around this with a little bit of manual work:

1. Install the plugin for CS5.
2. Use the shareware software Pacifist and open the Kindle for Adobe InDesign (Beta).pkg file with it.
3. Open up the directory tree until it looks like this:

   

4. Scripts first: out of the scripts folder, drag the Export for Kindle folder into your Adobe InDesign CS4/Scripts/ folder.
5. Plugins next: out of the plugin/version6/ folder, drag the other Export for Kindle folde into your Adobe InDesign CS4/Plug-ins/ folder.
6. Launch InDesign CS4—you should now see Export to Kindle under the File menu (un-alphabetically tucked between Export for Digital Editions and Export for Dreamweaver.)

Check out this thread on InDesignSecrets for a little more on the state of this plugin, and follow the #eprdctn hashtag on Twitter for all sorts of cool troubleshooting, hacking, and business-related ePub tweets!

Installing Creative Suite on a new machine is a chance for fun and games with activation, of course, and I bumped into two nice new (to me) flaws. I’m writing this from memory weeks after the install, but this is how they occurred to the best of my recollection:

I discovered that you must launch Acrobat for the first time before you launch Distiller for the first time. Acrobat has a slightly different activation/serial scheme than the rest of Creative Suite, because it’s not a “proper” part of the Creative Suite. I don’t use Distiller much, but I was curious to see the speed improvement in distilling a large file, so I fired it up … and activation broke. Now, whenever I launched Acrobat, I would get one of those infuriating “Licensing for this product has stopped working” errors.

So I went and downloaded the Licensing Service Update which is listed as a solution for various activation issues for both Creative Suite 3 and Creative Suite 4.

I try to run it, and the Licensing Service Update will not run if you do not have a password set on your OS X user account. I’m assuming this is a simple error in the Python script that launches the update, but this is just pure silliness! (For those of you who are saying “Why do you not have a password on your account?!”—when I am working on a new or freshly-installed machine, I don’t set a password until after I’ve installed all the major pieces of software/updates.)

I went into OS X’s Prefences and set a password for the account I was using, then tried running Licensing Service Update again this time, it worked.

So, with the explanation of the situation out of the way, here is Advice For Avoiding Creative Suite Activation Wasting Your Time:

1. Install Creative Suite.
2. Launch InDesign, Photoshop, or Illustrator. Then close it.
3. Launch Acrobat. Then close it.
4. Run the Licensing Service Update. Just in case.
5. Install all the relevant updates for Creative Suite.

It’s too much to hope for, but “No Product Activation” would be a welcome feature in Creative Suite 5; well worth paying for!

Adobe regularly gets beat upon for the Creative Suite installer and updater, which is by itself a large piece of software managing even larger pieces of software. I won’t even pretend to understand how they all tie together, but Adobe does have a new-ish Adobe Installation and Licensing blog that discusses issues that relate to the installer.

I don’t like spending a lot of time complaining about the installer and upgrader, bcause frankly—I don’t encounter them that often. In terms of Time Spent With Creative Suite, installing and upgrading is a fraction of a percent. But—there’s always that but—I just did a fresh install of Snow Leopard on my MacBook Pro (Not my main production machine) and I took some screenshots of the install process, to illustrate a quick and easy way to reclaim some disk space after installing Adobe Creative Suite 4 updates.

Now, if I’m installing about 220MB of updates, even assuming that all of the download is compressed, it should also be assumed that some of the updated files are replacing already existing files, not creating entirely new files on the drive. So in the following screenshot, you’ll see that roughly 300MB of disk space has been taken up after the update … and there’s also a mysterious hidden directory in my Creative Suite folder — “.AdobePatchFiles”

I use PathFinder as a Finder replacement, which easily allows me to see hidden files and directories. If you’re using the regular Finder, this Lifehacker tip will show you how to make it show hidden files.

You’ll also note that I install all the Creative Suite apps into a folder called /Applications/Creative Suite/, to help keep my /Applications/ folder more tidy. If you install in the default /Applications/ folder, the the .AdobePatchFiles/ folder will be /Applications/.AdobePatchFiles/.

The patching process is finished and Adobe Updater is closed, so let’s take a peek in that directory:

Well, that’s more than the entire download size! Let’s dig a bit deeper:

Boy, those files look … like temporary files that didn’t get properly cleaned up.

Delete the entire directory and gain that space back. No ill benefits that I’ve found — and even though I only saved about 260MB, remember that I only installed some of the Creative Suite 4 updates; I skipped the apps I’m not regularly using at this time. Had I installed more updates, that directory would be even larger.

I use both iChat and Adium for instant messenging: iChat for the voice, video, and screensharing features; Adium for the ability to connect with multiple accounts to multiple networks, and I prefer the interface to the “bubbly iChat.”

The company is experimenting with InCopy right now, with one of our developers [project manager and editor and writing all rolled into one]. Today he fed me a copy InCopy INDP files while I was using iChat, and I noticed that iChat was tossing up a strange dialog at the conclusion of the file send, and then the files appeared on my hard drive not as a nice OS X style package, but as a directory. Needless to say, double-clicking on the directory did not import it properly into InDesign.

A Sad InCopy file, roughly handled by iChat.

I had the developer re-send the file, and this time I used Adium to download it. No problem, imported perfectly. A few more experiments later, and I have an easy conclusion:

If you are receiving INDP files via iChat, have the sender—regardless of what IM client they are using to send the file!— zip the file first before sending it, or use a different IM client to receive the file.

A Happy InCopy file, transferred across the net with Adium.