Did this just appear recently, or is it something that you've experienced in AI 10 from the start? I don't remember ever having this happen to me.

I use AI 10 in OS X 10.2 at work.

It's happened since i got it. Also happens on my friends version as well.

Both of us are on Macs. And OSX.

It's not that big of a deal, but it's pretty damn annoying.

I would love to find a solution to this as well. Very annoying. And why does my tool palette disappear randomly when launching the application? Yeesh.

If you've never seen this occur, here are some screen dumps illustrating the difference between a bounding box selection and the �grey box� selection.

Ooohh, I see. Yes, that happens to me too.

I had visions of large fields of grey when I read your description. I have no idea what it is or how to turn it off. I must've just gotten used to it and forgotten about it.

I have went through every preference in Illustrator. I am wondering if this is some strange OSX thing.

Cept, I don't see it in other programs. I have deciphered why it is there (I think). When you shift-click and move an object it shows the boundries you can move before the object snaps onto the next coordinate. But, I don't need to know that.

Grr. Where's that Adobe guy?

Tiffany, how is CS btw? Was curious about it, don't know anyone personally that is using it just yet.

(and it doesn't have anything to do with the tool)

>>In my mind it seems it should be able to be as fast as quark. Why isn't it?

This isn't really my field, so I could be talking nonsense, but the thing that springs to mind is that you are probably doing much more with InD, than you did with Quark - even if you don't realise it.
For example, if your Quark experience is pre-version 6, then you were working without multiple undo. Think of all the available options that make you want to use InD, rather than Quark. Now, even if you're not using them, you might be, so InD has to check to see if you are, and it has to leave the door open in case you want to in the future, and then it has to leave a route back to anywhere in your session, incase you want to undo your way all the way back to lunchtime.
This is why we all have to keep buying new hardware - because the software does so many new things (which we all take for granted after about 15 seconds).

Myself, I have found InD CS slightly faster than 2.0, although it is still slower than QuarkXPress. OTOH, QXP 6 is considerably slower than previous versions of QXP....

Steve's right that many of the standard features of InDesign will slow it down. For example:
- hi-res graphics previews
- paragraph composer
- unlimited undo

If performance is an issue, one can adjust some of these (and other options) to improve performance, at a cost of features. I believe there is a standard tech note on improving InD performance on the Adobe Web site.

(BTW, no clue on the grey box in Illustrator. Sorry.)

Cheers,

T

> This is why we all have to keep buying new hardware - because the software does so many new things

Naaah. I think the real reason is that inefficient code is good for this perception-driven economy (as long as all the big players are about equally inefficient). Fontographer 3.1 does most of what 4 does, and it's magnitudes leaner and faster - I used to run it in 512 RAM with one floppy drive... under Mac emulation!

hhp