Way back in the days of PageMaker, from time to time I would have a PM file that would go corrupt on me. It’s a few years ago now so I can’t recall exactly what the symptoms were but, when it happened, all I could do was salvage what I could from the file and rebuild it from scratch.
I was under the impression those days were long gone, ever since I started using InDesign (I skipped the first, but started with IDv.2). Lately, however, an odd behaviour has appeared that makes me wonder if I might have the occasional corrupt file now.
I regularly produce a document that has two main fonts — ITC Souvenir for body text (and a few other features) and Optima for headings, sub-headings, references etc., in a variety of weights and styles. I have paragraph styles (and some character styles) set up for the entire document so that there is virtually no need for local overrides. The content is mostly imported from Word (Office for Mac, 2004), either using the same paragraph style names and descriptions, or else (more commonly) as Word’s “normal” and then allocated styles within InDesign.
Here’s the weird thing, however; sometimes a paragraph that should be in Souvenir appears as Optima. In the paragraph styles panel the Clear Overrides button at the bottom is greyed out. If I select the paragraph and change it to Souvenir, then the Clear Overrides button becomes active and, if I click on it, the paragraph goes back to Optima. When I inspect the style settings for the paragraph style, it clearly says Souvenir for the font and yet InDesign has (in this instance) insisted on giving it Optima. Strangely, other paragraphs of the same style in the same document behave properly.
Do InDesign files go corrupt like this sometimes? The only solution I have found is to recreate the document from scratch, importing paragraph and character styles from an older document known to have been “pure”. That is very annoying and time consuming.
Is there something I have missed here? I am using InDesign CS4 on a 24-inch iMac with 2GB of RAM running Mac OS 10.4.11.
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