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Sorry, I've been away for a while.

Yvonne, your reply is actually *very* helpful, because it's exactly what we needed to understand why you were not expecting this issue, and it gives us a chance to do more investigation into repro. Can you please send me the version of the file that printed correctly *before* the text changes were made? (Use the same off-list mechanism as before.) Thanks!

Kim, can you recover from backup the file and links *before* you updated the links, and then file and links *after* you updated the links but before ID recognized they had changed? Our team would love to have them for investigation. (You can find how to contact me off-list up above.) Thanks!

Yvonne,

Drat. I was afraid you were going to say that. Can you tell me whether you placed the high-res file by dragging or using the Place command or maybe relinking a template or something? We are trying to repro this problem in-house, but whenever we place the high-res file we always get a link that knows it's a high-res file. We are hoping you folks might use a standard placement workflow or template or something that we could try using and see if we can get the problem to re-occur.

Thanks for any info. And I'm sorry again this happened.

dan

Thanks Yvonne for sending the files. Here's what we found when we analyzed them:

- there are a number of links that show the correct file size in ID3's "Link Information..." screen. These all print properly.
- there are a number of links (mostly the ones with "Stock" in the filename) that show the wrong file size in ID3's "Link Information..." screen. These all print low-res.

Unfortunately, the behavior that you're seeing (incorrect printing of links which believe they are low-res but whose files are high-res) is a known issue with ID CS3 if the dates on the files match the dates on the links. One of the improvements we made in ID CS4 --- one that would have saved you in this case --- is that links keep track not only of file date but of file size: if you open your ID CS3 file in ID CS4, you will see that it immediately sees that the file size has changed and updates the links even though the dates match. So clearly you can avoid this problem by upgrading to ID CS4 :). But I know that's not the advice you're looking for...

As I mentioned earlier in this thread, the "usual" way you end up with links which have low-res link information and high-res originals is to place from a low-res file and then update the file content (but not its date) with high-res. But you are saying that's not what happened here, and I believe you. So we here at Adobe are all scratching our heads trying to figure out what happened in this case. Can you remember anything about how these links were created? Was a drag-drop done of the files? Were there any scripts involved? Was a Place... command used? Did the links come from Adobe Stock Photo in Bridge? From a stock library you routinely use? I have been trying and trying to replicate this situation another way and I can't do it. And I can't give you any better suggestions for how to avoid the problem unless I can figure out how your workflow triggered it. So I'm afraid I'm stuck without more information.

Once again, I am sorry that you got bit by ID CS3's blind trust in file dates. Hopefully the info here can help you to avoid the problem in future.

Yvonne, I've been looking for a way to contact you off list to give you file upload info, but apparently this site doesn't support that yet. Can you please go the Adobe Forums site (http://forums.adobe.com/) and look for me (Adobe_DanB) as a user there? Then send me a private message and I will reply with upload instructions. Thanks! -d.

Hmmm, just read your reply. Interesting. The only time InDesign doesn't actually use the source when printing is when (i) it believes the link is embedded, or (ii) it can't find the linked file. It sounds like it's worth your getting me the ID3 file and links so we can look at it. Let me go figure out how that can be done.

Just heard from the ID team, and they have an additional question for you: are your links on a network file system (e.g., a mounted file server volume) and, if so, is it a Mac-style (AFP) or Windows-style (SMB) mount? (We are aware of an issue with ID CS3 that we have never been able to reproduce in-house in which links on an AFP file-system mount are not seen as out-of-date even though they are. But this is not exactly your situation, at least as I understand your report. It sounds like you are saying that you originally placed hi-res images and then never updated them, but they never printed correctly?)

Ouch! I am very sorry; that must have been a very bad experience. It's also a horse of a different color: I would agree that it's "not supposed to work that way"!!

In my (extensive) experience with problems like this, sending me the doc and images is not going to help, because for some reason (different computers, different operating systems, who knows!) we will not be able to reproduce the problem in-house and we will just sound like we're saying it's your fault, which clearly it wasn't.

Also, while I hate to sound like a corporate dweeb, we released ID CS4 about a year ago now, so it will be hard for me to get the team to look at a CS3 problem unless they can repro it in CS4 (and see above paragraph). So, I have a different suggestion. I will go check with the team to see what they know about this bug in CS3. My hope is that they will come back with something like "nope, she's not crazy, we have seen this happen under such and such a condition, and our recommended workaround is ..." (or, sometimes, even better, "and we fixed that for CS4" :).

In the meantime, can you please reply telling me all of the version info in your "About" box, and also go into the plugin manager inside InDesign and give the complete list of the plug-ins you are using. Also, can you tell me what kind of image files the high-res files were: jpeg, psd, tiff, whatever? Sometimes these problems are due to the exact plug-in that's importing the file format not working properly with the InDesign link system.

Sorry I can't be of more help right away. I urge you always to do a forced link refresh before you go to print while we try to isolate this problem. But I'm sure you've thought of that, as once burned is twice careful, and I'm sorry for the extra work. -d.

The first question that comes to my mind is "how did the low-res images get in there in the first place"? If you placed the high-res images to begin with, then InDesign would *know* that it was showing you low-res previews in the doc and it would force fetch the high-res images whenever it printed.

My suspicion is that your workflow uses FPO images to create the original links, and then later - possibly during the packaging step, possibly earlier - replaces the FPO images with the high-res images. Now, *unless* the replacement high-res files are given modification dates *later* than the original FPOs, then InDesign won't know that the files on disk have changed and so it won't show you a link out-of-date warning and so it won't go to fetch the new images when printing. This seems to be exactly the behavior you are reporting.

Note that, in your workflow for replacing the FPOs with high-res, what you *don't* want to do is simply do a file-system copy of the high-res images on top of the FPOs. This is because a file-system copy will preserve the date on the high-res, which is almost certainly earlier than (or the same as) that of the FPO created from it. If you are using file-system copies, then you will either need to manually touch the files to update their dates, or you will need to go into InDesign before packaging and *force* it to update all links. (Force updating all links, by the way, is *always* a good idea whenever you are going to package for print.)

Hope this helps. -d.

I suggest you use some other applications first for a while, then restart your computer, then try launching DW again. If that doesn't work, then - yes - you can reinstall just Dreamweaver. You will need to run the installer again and de-select all the other products for reinstallation. Good luck!