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• • January 7, 2011 at 8:45 am #58320
    Rhiannon Miller

    Member

    I'm having a recurring problem with my InDesign CS5. It often crashes when I try to save a document, corrupting the document to the point where automatic recovery can't cope (it keeps crashing on reopening until I tell it to delete the recovery data). Then of course I can't load the document I was working on any more. The only way I can save my work is by frequently doing a 'save a copy' and keeping that as a backup… until InDesign crashes when I'm saving the copy, thus corrupting both the original file and the copy!

    I've restarted my computer (Mac OS 10.6) and deleted my InDesign preferences. I've tried recreating my documents from scratch, saving as IDML files, and moving pages to another document. The problem is still happening. The longer I work on any given document the more frequently it seems to happen, though that might just be my imagination. Has anyone else had a similar problem? I'm really tearing my hair out here!

  • January 7, 2011 at 9:51 am #58324
    David Blatner

    Keymaster

    Sounds horrible! And it sounds as though you've tried all the obvious stuff.

    I wonder if: You're saving to a server? Perhaps there are corrupted fonts or font caches? You're using Save As every so often? You're using any plug-ins that might be causing weirdness?

    Obviously, most ID users don't have this issue. Not sure what could be “special” about your set up that would cause this.

  • January 7, 2011 at 10:08 am #58326
    Rhiannon Miller

    Member

    Thanks for your suggestions David. I'm working on this locally. I'm Saving As very regularly, as you can imagine. The only plug-in I had was Rorohiko's Text Exporter, and I removed that to no effect.

    I've just validated my fonts in FontBook and found one corrupted font, but it's one I haven't used for years. I've removed it anyway, just in case it helps. I'm off home for the weekend now to drink a nice glass of wine!

  • January 10, 2011 at 7:26 am #58343
    Rhiannon Miller

    Member

    OK, removing that corrupt font didn't seem to help. I've narrowed it down a bit: it seems to happen when I save after recomposing significant amounts of text (e.g. showing/hiding conditional text, cutting/pasting text). Is this a clue?

  • January 14, 2011 at 4:59 am #58377
    Duger53

    Participant

    I have a related problem every so often where ID will crash on Quit. Doesn't mess up any documents, though. I've found that the perferences are the culprit. I trashed the whole folder en_US (root/library/preferences/Adobe Indesign/Version 7.0/) and redid all of my perferences within InDesign, then went back to that folder and made a compressed archive so that when it happens again, I just have to delete and restore my compressed copy.

    You didn't say that you deleted the preferences, you might try that but save a compressed copy of the old one, too. I did move over things like custom screen layouts.

  • January 18, 2011 at 4:41 am #58400
    Rhiannon Miller

    Member

    (Duger53, I did try wiping my preferences, as I said in my initial post, and it didn't help. Sorry!)

    OK, the files appear to be stable if I change all the conditional text to unconditional. Unfortunately I do need to be able to hide and reveal some parts of my text for different outputs. Is there any other way of doing that?

  • January 18, 2011 at 6:23 am #58401
    Duger53

    Participant

    Sorry orielwen, I missed that. Eyes are getting old. Another crash problem I had was leaving the live flight check on. I was having crashes all the time. I turned it off and they stopped. I can turn it on briefly to check a document without a crash but not leave it on. This was some time ago and I don't know if they fixed it or not. CS5 version on a Intel Mac.

  • January 19, 2011 at 4:16 pm #58426
    David Blatner

    Keymaster

    So Preflight and Conditional text? Neither of those crash for me, nor should they crash for you. I have heard that preflight can slow down on a really big document. Hm.

    Other than IDML and rebuilding preferences, I'm not sure what to suggest. Perhaps try this on another computer, or create a new log-in account on your computer and try it from there.

  • January 20, 2011 at 5:40 am #58431
    Duger53

    Participant

    It seems to come and go. After doing the preference clean up I talked about above, InDesign seemed to behave itself. Then, yesterday, it must have crashed 4 times in an hour and a half session. I exported an IDML, rebooted and only loaded one document at a time and was able to get through what I needed to do.

    I use FontExplorer X Pro and I've wondered if that could be causing problems. It certianly does not work as expected (not loading the fonts that are in the document). I also wonder about DropBox ever since SugarSync caused so many problems with everything on the Mac (10.6.6 late model MacPro) that I deleted it.

    By the way, David, I really enjoy your InDesign Secrets podcast (you to Anne Marie). I have listened to every one since podcast #1.I know I'm not alone in saying that the InDesign user community is deeply in debted to both of you. Thank you.

  • January 20, 2011 at 6:24 am #58432
    David Blatner

    Keymaster

    Thanks very much for your kind comments, Duger53.

    I don't know if dropbox could cause problems like this (unlikely), but font activation certainly could, if you're using the autoactivation plug-in. See my rant against these plug-ins here:

    https://creativepro.com/wha…..vation.php

    The other thing that has caused me no end of crashes is shared hyperlinks, especially those that are across multiple documents, or that use shared destinations from other documents.

  • February 28, 2011 at 5:07 am #58816
    Rhiannon Miller

    Member

    I'm still having this problem, though I'm mostly avoiding it by steering clear of Conditional Text. There generally does come a point when I need it though, and what I'm mostly doing then is exporting to IDML and then applying the conditional text to that document. This usually doesn't crash, unless I try to hide the conditional text. To save the changes, I export out again as IDML rather than saving the new file as INDD.

    I opened one such IDML file today, where two different conditions of text had been applied, and found that one of the conditions was applied not only to the paragraph I'd put it on, but also all subsequent paragraphs up to the next instance of the other condition. When I tried to return these paragraphs to their correct, unconditional, state, InDesign crashed, but was able to restore the document on restart.

    Is this another clue?

  • February 28, 2011 at 12:01 pm #58824
    David Blatner

    Keymaster

    We talked about some tech issues in our last podcast:

    https://creativepro.com/ind…..st-144.php

    one of these is a strange SING problem, which seems to affect some people and not others:

    https://www.claudiamccue.com/20…..dont-sing/

    and

    https://kb2.adobe.com/cps/408/k…..08816.html

  • March 1, 2011 at 3:12 am #58833
    Rhiannon Miller

    Member

    Yes, I tried removing the SING datastore and plugin a while back. It had no effect.

    Thanks for the suggestion though.

  • March 1, 2011 at 8:12 am #58838
    Anne-Marie Concepcion

    Member

    Which version of InDesign are you using? Are you fully patched to the latest update for that version? I believe CS5 is up to 7.03 and CS4 is up to 6.0.6.

    How long is your document? How long is the story in which you have conditional text … I mean, does it extend over 8 pages? 80? 800? Have you tried seeing if you get the same crash-y behavior on a test copy of the file that's just a portion of it, like 10 pages?

    AM

  • March 1, 2011 at 9:08 am #58839
    Rhiannon Miller

    Member

    CS5, fully up to date.

    Yes, they're long documents: maybe 200 pages, with perhaps 8–10 stories of 20–30 pages each, all with some conditional text (a little on each page). I'm finding that if I take a single chapter into a new document, I usually get a stable document – but there have been exceptions. On the other hand, if I create a new 200-page document and fill it with placeholder text, and add some conditional text on each page (I have a script for this), this is stable. I'm wondering whether it's something to do with the Word documents that I import in as the source of the copy text. But if so, I have no idea how to track it down.

  • March 3, 2011 at 9:00 am #58866
    maerose

    Member

    hi

    Same thing was hppening to me, I turned off 'Activate fonts in embedded objects' and it cured it

    Sam

  • March 3, 2011 at 9:01 am #58867
    maerose

    Member

    Sorry that was in Suitcase fusion 3 in prefs

    sam

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