Reply To: How to open an IDML file that crashes

Hey, thanks David!

Great article! That’s good to know about hiding links to hunt down problems. I haven’t heard that before, though I knew about the INDD-to-IDML file fix. But this week was the first time I ran into an IDML that wouldn’t open. Good to know hiding links can help things open! :) And I have backups to the files, but it wasn’t clear when the problem had started.

I think in my case the problem was clearly related to hyperlinks. I work with 2 editors who are accessing the file with InCopy. They started tracking each other’s changes, and I think that might have caused InDesign to try to remember the same hyperlink too many times (and maybe that corrupted one of them?). That’s just a guess on my part. I asked them to try to accept each other’s changes more often to see if that helps with file stability (and not making the Hyperlinks panel crash). I did read that other people have had problems with the hyperlinks panel in the past, so maybe it’s a bit bug-ridden in general. I hadn’t had occasion to use it much until recently when we started working on a new online complement for our magazine.

Thanks, Phyllis