280 Screen redraw problems

- InDesign does its best to show you a really accurate view of your page, but sometimes it, well, it fails. Usually it's just a small oddity. Like, see how the top edge of this rounded corner rectangle up here, it looks wrong. It's the wrong thickness. It goes from thick to thin. Now, that might be hard to see on the video, but believe me, it really looks wrong on my screen. Now, it's not really the wrong size. It just looks wrong on screen. And this is called a screen redraw problem.

Now, sometimes the problem is way bigger, like one common problem I've had with InDesign is tables that just disappear from the screen while I'm editing them. It's really annoying! But I can't show you that one because I never know when it's going to happen. But, believe me, sooner or later it'll happen to you! And so I need to tell you about a great keyboard shortcut. Command, options, slash. Or control, alt, slash. That forces InDesign to redraw the screen. And it almost always fixes stuff, like those disappearing tables.

Or text that isn't reflowing properly and things like that. But, here, that shortcut isn't doing anything! It's not fixing that stroke-weight and that's because this screen redraw problem has to do with something called GPU rendering. It's a relatively new feature that was added to InDesign CC in 2016. And it's great, but sometimes it's a little bit buggy. Now, just for some background, a GPU is a Graphics Processing Unit and it's a separate chip inside some computers.

Basically, the CPU, the Central Processing Unit is like the main brains of your computer but when it needs to do graphics intensive work, the CPU can hand it off to the GPU. But, this only works with certain systems. For example, you'll only see the GPU features if your computer has at least a gigabyte of VRAM and if your display is high res, what they call high DPI, like the retina displays on some Mac laptops. So, if your system supports GPU, then you'll see a little rocket up here in the application bar.

See that icon? And, next to the name of your document, up here in this tab, you'll see a little GPU Preview in brackets. Now, that little rocket icon is actually a button, and if you click it, it opens up the GPU performance pane of the preferences dialog box. And here, inside preferences dialog box, you can see your GPU details down here. This is my graphics card. And, notice that you can turn on and off the GPU performance features up here with this check box.

I'll go ahead and click OK because I want to point out that you don't have to go to your preferences dialog box to turn this on and off. Generally, the GPU thing is great because it makes your screen redraw much faster. Especially when you have a lot of images, or a complex layout. But, as I said, it doesn't always draw everything exactly right. So, if you ever see something like this, where you rub your eyes and say, "Huh? What's going on there?" All you need to do is come up to the View menu and choose Preview on CPU.

That means turn off the GPU thing temporarily. Now, you'll see up here in the document title bar, GPU Preview goes away. And, more importantly, that little screen redraw bug is cleared up down here on this corner rounded rectangle. So, okay, now I know this was just a GPU screen redraw bug, it's just inside InDesign. This will still print or export to PDF just fine with the GPU preview is turned on or off. Screen redraw bugs are annoying, but they usually won't get in your way too much.

Especially now that you know that redraw screen shortcut. You know, command, options, slash. Or control, alt, slash. And also, the CPU Preview trick.