InDesign trial on top of CS 2.3 -- will I hate myself in the morning?

Question

I have CS 2.3 but need InDesign 3 for a project. I want to upgrade to CS 3 but can't yet, so am playing with the option of downloading the InDesign 3 trial for now. What kind of problems am I going to run into?? And is it worth it?

Answer 1

Hi Dorothy,
I presume you know that the trial has only a 30 day life (and I believe its terms actually preclude using it for production work -- although that does seem somewhat unrealistic).
Problems fall into two camps:
1. Those you'll have with two versions of the same app (trial or not) on the same computer.
These fall more into the self-discipline area than anywhere else. InDesign versions all use the same file extension for their documents, so there is some danger of opening a document with the wrong version, resulting in either an error message about missing plug-ins (if you try to open a CS3 doc with CS2) or accidental conversion of a CS2 doc to CS3.
I've trained myself to avoid double-clicking to open documents, either right-clicking to get at the Open-with... sub-menu (that's on a Mac -- I presume Windows has the same feature), or opening from within the application. This doesn't completely solve the problem if I choose the wrong document but it takes the randomness out of it.
2. Those you'll have when the time comes to convert from trial to the real thing.
I'm not 100% sure of these issues because I've never done it. I've seen reports that:
Uninstalling CS3 messes up a CS2 install, so you might need to uninstall both the CS3 trial and CS2 and then reinstall both.
Also, you might need to run a clean-up script to get rid of the administrative information about your trial install in order to get the real CS3 to operate.
This tech note:
http://kb.adobe.com/selfservice/viewContent.do?externalId=331649
seems to be about CS2. Maybe the CS3 installer/uninstaller does a better job.
Dave