How do you get IDcs5 to open and display properly??

Question

Purchased InDesign CS5 and it worked well for the first few months then it decided not to open up properly onscreen? Now when opening all I ever get is a tiny portion of the tool bar appearing in the upper left corner of the screen. If I use the 'expand' button it only fills the screen with a completely blank page which is of no use. So I'm left to resort to manually clicking and dragging the toolbar to open the workspace to fill the screen......even then, it tends to 'snap back' to the tiny toolbar in the upper left corner? This is very annoying and frustrating to say the least! I'm working in a windows environment running Windows 7 if that makes any difference. I've searched but there appears to be no fix for this? Why does it not just open up on screen properly like every other program??? Why can't the folks at ADOBE fix this? The only reason I'm using this program is because one of our biggest clients insists on using InDesign, otherwise I'd dump it! Does anyone know the cause or fix for this? Sure would appreciate it! Thanks!

Answer 1

@Peter – I cannot tell what's going on here, because I'm working on a Mac OSX 10.6.8.
I've seen such a thing in InDesign CS4, but not in InDesign CS5.5 anymore.
However, maybe it is possible to resize the main window by scripting its bounds.
For that, one file must be opened and its window must be resized with JavaScript. At least on a Mac. Could be different on Windows, because some UI elements behave different from OS to OS.
To get the right values for the bounds you could do the following:
Start InDesign, maximize it manually, open a new document. You need not to save it.
Then start the following line of code, that will read out the bounds of the window and present them as text in a "palette" type of window:
#targetengine "session";
//Get the bounds and convert them to a String object:
var myMessageString = String(app.documents[0].windows[0].bounds);
var w=new Window("palette","ReadOutBoundsOfWindow:");
var e=w.add("edittext",[0,0,200,50],myMessageString,{multiline: true,scrolling:true});
e.active = true;
w.show();
As a result you'll get a string of 4 numbers in a "palette" highlighted.
Copy/paste the values together with separating commas to your text editor or the ESTK.
Currently I'm on a MacBook Pro and the numbers I will get with that method are: 22,0,999,1680.
The numbers will be different, depending on your screen size and resolution. They are values for pixels in the form: [top, left, bottom, right].
Now you can close the palette.
That was just the preparation for the following lines of code, that will set the bounds.
Every time after you restarted InDesign, you could execute the following script (you can assign a keyboard shortcut to it):
app.documents.add();
//Exchange the values in the brackets with YOUR values you obtained with the other script.
//Thiese values set the working window to a specific size [top, left, bottom, right]:
app.documents[0].windows[0].bounds = [22,0,999,1680]; //Thiese are the values of my specific MacBook Pro.
//Now we don't need the dummie document anymore. Close it:
app.documents[0].close(SaveOptions.NO);
Like I said, it's working on a Mac.
Don't know if it will on MS Windows.
Uwe