InDesign Document Repair: Extreme
Anne-Marie has presented a session on “The Zen of InDesign Repair” at the last couple of InDesign conferences, and it’s always well-attended. After all, anyone who has been using InDesign for a while knows that sometimes (fortunately not frequently, but sometimes…) files get corrupted, or weird stuff starts happening in the program.
She talked about this in this post about rebuilding the preferences files, and it’s all still as true today as it was back then.
People have come up with all kinds of great techniques for rescuing files, but Anne-Marie recently pointed this blog post out to me, and I have to say it takes the cake — both for being ingenious and painful. Basically, this guy had a corrupted file (it crashed InDesign each time he opened it), so he used Markzware’s ID2QX XTension to open the file in QuarkXPress, saved the file, and then used their Q2ID plug-in to open it back up in InDesign!
By the way, the video on that blog post didn’t work when I tried it. To see the video of him converting the file, check ou this youtube link.
Seems like Markzware could save him (or others) a lot of time by just making a converter/repair utility, much like their old MarkzTools product did for XPress. Anyone else want that?
Update 4/10: Arnold at Markzware posted another (more detailed) movie on youtube about converting corrupt InDesign documents. Also, if you have corrupted documents, check out this post, asking for samples so they can try to create a “fix it” tool.
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One has to wonder what percentage of corrupted documents could actually be salvaged in this fashion.
Dave
I take a lot of documents that came from one typesetting package and converted to rtf and reimported to InDesign, to keep the styles in tack.
My InDesign file has all styles set up, so I can easily map the styles to the InDesign ones.
One thing I noticed was that sometimes I would be working on the document and it won’t get by a specific page or pages.
What sometimes happens is that the styles (or information in the styles) get crossed, i.e., it tries to apply a character style where a character style is already there within a paragraph style.
So the simplest solution I found was to zoom on the page so I could see just that page. Then inserting the type tool I press SHIFT and then on the pages panel click about 3 pages down. Then click again, now all the type is selected.
I simply click NONE on the chara styles panel and basic paragraph on the paragraph panels.
Sure I have to go in and set those couple of pages. But it stops InDesign crashing. And a lot of the time, it’s exactly why the file was crashing.
Although, just watched the video, that is excellent, I’ll be sure to remember that if a file ever melts down like that. Excellent stuff.
worked for me….we had a power cut as i was working on our mag layout in indesign, when the ups failed i knew that the doc was gonna be screwed, anyhow, id2q & q21d conversion worked and we saved a hell of a lot of work!
[…] Of course this procedure doesn’t help for those instances where the file crashes when opening. For a technique in fixing that situation, see David Blatner’s post https://creativepro.com/indesign-document-repair-extreme.php. […]
A free program called INDDRecovery (for Windows only) successfully restored a bunch of damaged files for me. The original page posted by author — Mikhail Kondakov — is in Russian. I translated it into English so that more people could get to know about it.
+1 for INDDRecovery – just worked for me on a 48 page InDesign file which would cause CS3 to crash. Thanks Kasyan!
Hi all, you guys know Indesign very well but have you ever faced any corruption on Indesign file? I have a software that can repair your corrupt Indesign files. Please try it out and let me know what you feel about? Try Here – https://www.stellarinfo.com/media-tools/indesign-repair-mac.php
Tried your product demo, Vishal. Unfortunately it just keeps cycling with the progress bar, with no indication what it’s doing. It’s also continually accessing the Applications folder, which seems a bit dodgy. And Activity Monitor tells me it’s using 19% of my CPU power. WTF? I hope it’s not damaging my system in some way!
@AaronA,
Sorry couldn’t reply you earlier.
May be the INDD file isn’t a valid file. It however depends upon the severity of the damage done to the file. Or OS X compatibility could also be another factor behind software sluggishness. I recommend you retry with disabling the Firewall as it may be conflicting with the application. This software have been tested on all Macs and have been rolled out after passing through various parameters.
Hope this helps!!
with this software https://www.kasyan.ho.com.ua/indd_recovery.html i managed to recover at least the text content of my corrupt indesign file. (adobe CC / Win 7)