Updated May 8, 2007

Here are questions and answers that are cropping up with APT. Check back frequently for new information, which will be added to the top of the document.

Someone tried to copy something to my personal queue and she was told she didn't have privileges to do so … is that odd?

APT’s Jim McKee has expanded permissions to allow anyone to copy to editing queues and make changes to items filed there. All WSJ reporters and editors should be able to access and change items that have been copied from their individual queues to any queue under any “Ready” branch in all departments. If this level of permission is not working for you, please let me know.

Editors already should have expanded permissions and we will doublecheck to make sure reporters and copy editors can not only copy but open stories in any editing queue. If you send an item to another reporter or editor personal queue, you will no longer have access to it, however. Production queues such as Jstory are open only to editors working on pages.

Stories can be copied from wire queues without restriction.

I figured out the blue-button system for advancing stories through APT. But can stories be sent backwards in this workflow?

Yes. Just use the backward arrow. Editors will be able, as they are now, to bounce stories back to reporters' queues or to earlier status. After a story has left a reporter's hands, a reporter will be able to get back into the story to make corrections or add late-breaking information working out of an editing queue under the "ready" folder in your department as lists on the dashboard. Similarly, copy editors can send a story back to a ready queue with questions. Stories that are held will remain in a ready queue.

In layout view, why do headlines appear underneath a story instead of on top as they would on the page?

Elements appear in “page geometry” in the order created. Be sure to make the headline the first element created.

I’ve heard the system crawls sometimes. What can be done?

Speed and response have improved in recent days. All computers equipped with InDesign have been upgraded with a plug-in that has improved system speed in live tests over the weekend. If you continue to experience significant -- more than a minute -- slowdowns when updating or closing a page, let us know.

If your computer or the system seems to slow down consistently during a certain process or at a certain time in the production cycle, please give us as much detail as you can on the situation and we will look into it.

Curses, minimized again! What’s the deal?

After stories have been placed on page, copy editors find that InCopy launches and then immediately minimizes, and a user has to click the minimized story open again. This is a bug between Adobe and APT that has been known for some time and still hasn't been figured out. Thanks for your patience.

How long is this story?

We have just noticed that queues do not show the length of a story once it is placed on page. APT is aware of the problem and working on it. Depth count is working well prior to this stage in production so reporters and first-read editors should not encounter any problems.

Will we refine wire searches to make them more flexible?

Searches are currently limited to a global search or a single queue. As a first step toward creating better wire sorts, the wire queues were renamed to make future searches more relevant. If you left a wire queue open when you last closed Falcon -- or had searches based on the old queue names -- you'll getempty queuewindows. Just close and reopen the renamed queue, and replace in your favorites.

New wire search instructions are on the way.

What’s the status of agate?

Efforts to convert business and sports agate remain in intensive development and testing. Business agate may be produced outside of APT and imported, or produce in Harris for this week, depending on progress Tuesday and Wednesday.

What’s page association?

If you’re not a designer, you don’t care. If you are and you don’t know, ask David right away. If you create or paginate pages, you should make page association your first step in your work on that page. Pages not associated with an edition will not route to archive or Web properly.


I don’t want to hunt through the folder structure for my queue. What can I do?

Create a favorite. From the dashboard, right-click on a queue and select “Add to Favorites” to add the queue to the favorites drop-down list in your dashboard.

Help! I’ve got a mess of queues open all over my screen.

Clicking the “arrange” button – its icon looks like four little squares -- will rearrange open queues to organized positions on the screen.

I can’t remember what all these little icons mean.

Placie your cursor over an icon without clicking on the icon. When you perform this “mouse-over” a “tool tip” will appear, containing a one or two-word description of the button, or its function.

I lost my story! How can I find it?

If you try to move your story to a new queue but somehow send it to another by accident, you can find it without hunting through a bunch of queues. If you remember the name, use global search in the top toolbar. Click on Search (Global) to search the content of all queues for specific words or phrases.

Searchable fields include the keyword and slug. You can use the “operators” to broaden or narrow the search as follows.

“Is Equal To” is an exact match to the “search string” (the actual search words)

“Matches” uses wild cards -- Wis* will return all items beginning with “Wis”, and *game returns all stories ending in “game”

“Contains” searches for words that appear anywhere in the search field.

“Not”, “Does “Not” returns all stories that don’t contain the search string.

I lost my dashboard! And when I click on Falcon Editorial on the bottom bar, nothing happens! How do I restore it?

Right-click on the minimized Falcon Editorial button, which pops up a menu. Click "restore" and you should get back all your tools.

How do I make a bullet?

Press and hold Alt then 8.