Hi Kevin,

I have an SD card that was taken out of a camera and placed in another without first downloading the photos. We tried using PhotoRescue (3 years old) to retrieve the photos. We were able to get some but most seem corrupt. Do you have any ideas how else to retrieve these photos? It is an 8GB card with approximately 1,000 photos.

Dear Becky:

It sounds like you did what you could do to get them. There are services that normally charge $700+ to retrieve info from drives, but that’s probably more than you want to spend to get your photos back. My favorite program to do this is Klix, from JoeSoft.com. It might be worth $30 to give it a try. Good luck! (Becky wrote back: “Thanks Kevin! I tried Klix and it retrieved almost all of the photos undamaged. I downloaded it for $30, but it’s worth it. Thanks!”)

From Victor in Tennessee:

Hi Kevin. How can I open an InDesign CS3 file in CS2?

Not a problem, Victor. Simply export the file in InDesign CS3 as an InDesign Interchange (INX) file. You will be able to open the file in InDesign CS2, CS3 or CS4. Now for an interesting side note. During a trip to Minnesota recently, someone told me they had been successful in opening an INX file in a text editor and changing a few numbers, which allowed them to open the file in earlier versions of InDesign than usual. Normally, an INX file can only be opened in versions of InDesign one number lower than the version it was exported from. This morning, I opened a file in InDesign CS4, exported it as an INX file, then changed three numbers in the INX file by opening it in Apple Text Editor and changing three settings. Sure enough, I sent the file to someone using InDesign CS and they were able to open the file successfully. The settings I changed were “DOMVersion,” “readerVersion” and “product.”

From Curt in Illinois:

Kevin, We are getting more and more ads from outside of our company in which black is made up of all four CMYK colors. I remember reading one of your articles a while back about either a plug-in or a program used to fix these PDF files. Can you suggest a good one?

Yes, Curt. I can think of a couple of options.

Your most affordable option, other than to open the file in Photoshop and go through what can be a grueling process of converting the plates to black, is available in Acrobat 9 Pro. There is a color conversion tool that sometimes does a very good job of finding all the black text on multiple plates and converting them to the black plate only. While this doesn’t always work, it works often enough to give it a try. Another option, though a bit expensive for many newspaper budgets these days, is Enfocus Pitstop Pro. This plug-in for Acrobat does a great job of correcting color problems, including converting text on all four plates.

From Beckham in Iowa:

I’m having trouble that no one can seem to help with. My company is still using InDesign CS2. I tried calling Adobe for help, but they’re no longer supporting this version of Creative Suite. We just got two new 27” iMacs, with OS 10.6 (Snow Leopard). On the new computers, InDesign keeps crashing, won’t export PDFs, and randomly has items disappear from the page. Is this a problem with using CS2 on the new machines? I also thought it may be a problem with our ancient font package; a lot of them conflict with the system fonts in the new OS. I’ve disabled all of the fonts that do, but am still having problems. I am assuming that it’s either the fonts, or CS2 or both, but no one can tell me for sure. This only happens in InDesign.

Dear Beckham:

If it were the fonts, I would think you’d see similar problems in other applications. Have you tried throwing away your InDesign preferences? That’s the first thing I always try. You’ll find them in your User folder>Library>Preferences>com.adobe.indesign.plist. (Beckham wrote back the following: “I just exported a PDF. You made my day! Thanks.”)