Why Is InDesign Soooo Slow?
Erin wrote:
I am working on a brochure (40 pages, about 180 images). The document is running incredibly slow. It is not my computer, it is specifically inDesign. Every little action has about a 5 second delay!
There are many reasons why InDesign might be running slowly, but here’s a quick rundown of things I would try in this situation, more or less in the order I would likely try them.
Enough Memory?
RAM is like air to an app like InDesign. If you don’t have enough, it will be sluggish or even die. I would never try to run InDesign on a machine with less than 2 GB of RAM, and I’m forever cursing that my laptop with 8 GB is not enough (but I’m also constantly running 5 to 10 programs, often including Photoshop, Illustrator, and Word).
Hard drive space can also be a cause of problems, especially if you’re working on a nearly-full drive. Common wisdom says keep 10% of your drive free. (That’s 50 GB for a 500 GB drive!) InDesign relies on your drive because it writes to the “scratch disk” when it runs out of RAM (this happens far more than you’d expect).
Display Quality
There are three main display modes in InDesign: Fast, Typical, and High Quality (under View > Display Performance). Obviously, the higher the quality, the more InDesign has to think and the slower it’ll become. If you’re working in Typical and it still seems like one or more images are in high-quality mode, then those images may have display quality overrides applied to them. You can disable those from the Display Performance submenu. InDesign also has other display modes that could potentially slow it down: View > Proof Colors, and View > Overprint Preview. Normally, on a reasonably fast machine, those shouldn’t slow ID down, though.
Preflight
This is a big one. InDesign is constantly looking at your document to see if there are any “preflight errors,” such as overset text. If you have created a custom preflight profile, then it may be looking for lots of different things. Adobe insists that Preflight only works in the background when you’re not working, so it should not slow you down. But there is plenty of anecdotal evidence that preflight can get in the way. I almost always leave it on, but if you’re running into slowdowns, it’s definitely worth turning it off. You can disable it by double-clicking that little green or red dot in the lower-left corner of the screen, then turning off the On checkbox in the Preflight panel that appears.
Cross References
Probably the most notorious offender causing slowdowns in InDesign is the Cross-References feature. This is another example of “Adobe says it shouldn’t slow you down, but people keep coming up with examples that suggest it can.” The biggest problem, as far as I can see, is x-refs that span from one document to another. This doesn’t surprise me because I’ve also seen problems when hyperlinks span across documents. I personally think something is deeply wrong with the way Adobe engineered the whole cross-document thing, and I tend to think that cross-document referencing and linking should be avoided until it’s fixed. Now, that’s not possible for everyone, so here are two other options: First, it sounds as though having all the documents of a book open at the same time can help. That is, just open all the files whenever you’re going to be editing one of them. Annoying, but it should help. A second option is to look at the Cross-References Pro plug-in from dtptools. I don’t know for sure, but it sounds as though their x-ref technology is more robust than what Adobe came up with.
Live Screen Drawing
If you get stuttering or slow-downs when you move, resize, or rotate objects, then you should definitely consider setting the Live Screen Drawing pop-up menu to Delayed (in the Interface area of the Preferences dialog box). The Delayed option is how it worked in CS4 and earlier: If you click and hold the mouse button for about a second, then it kicks in to “Patient User mode” (where you can see the effect take place as you drag). Otherwise, you just get a gray bounding box. I’m fine with the gray bounding box if it means InDesign works faster!
Plug-ins (Font Activation)
You know I dislike all the font management auto-activation plug-ins and recommend people not install them. (I don’t know whose fault it is, Adobe’s or the add-on developers’, but they’re just buggy as heck.) One person reported that turning off the “Auto-activate Adobe Fonts” feature that activates fonts inside graphics helped a lot. This can be found by choosing Edit > Preferences > File Handling. But I’d try disabling the whole dang thing and see if that helps, too.
Rebuild Preferences
I’m not sure if rebuilding your preferences would help slow-downs, but if you’ve already tried everything else, then I would try hitting it with this. In the same vein, if you can’t figure out what else is causing the slow-down, you might try logging into your computer under a different account (like a guest account). If the problem goes away, then perhaps it’s something else system-wide going on.
All that said, there are some times when InDesign is just always going to be slow. For example, it tends to quit slowly—and the longer you’ve been using it, the longer it takes to quit. There are some technical reasons for this (I believe it has a lot to do with code that is cached on the scratch disk), but nothing you do will get around that. Some folks say they just use Force Quit (or End Task on Windows) to speed it up, but jeez, that makes me nervous. I wouldn’t do that unless it was taking over a couple of minutes and it was clear InDesign had actually crashed. Note that InDesign only writes your Preferences to disk when you quit properly, so if you force quit you may lose those.
InDesign will also run slowly when you’ve asked it to do something that takes a long time. I know that’s obvious, but it bears saying. I was once editing a 40-page index with 8-pt type, and I edited the index paragraph style definition… with the Preview checkbox turned on in the dialog box. Every change I made took a loooonnnngggg time, because InDesign had to update thousands of index entries, check line breaks changing, reflow, and so on. Turn off the Preview checkbox in those situations! (Unless you are paid by the hour.)
There could be a dozen other reasons InDesign is running slowly. (Or perhaps you drank too much coffee and it just seems like InDesign is moving slower than usual.) Do you have other suggestions that have been helpful for you besides these? Write ’em in below!
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Great list, David. Add page thumbnails in the Pages Panel to it. Turning them off does seem to help.
Quote: ” Normally, on a reasonably fast machine, those should slow ID down, though”.
That “should”, should probably be a “shouldn’t”.
One other thing that slows down InDesign, is having a lot of fonts installed.
Great list David! Let’s add this one to our Resources > InDesign FAQ’s list of Popular Posts https://creativepro.com/popular-posts
I have not found that having lots of fonts installed slows down InDesign, at least not in OS X, where the only time that may slow things down is when you’re rebooting the Mac or making Word or Photoshop to rebuild their fonts menu. In OS X, fonts only use resources when they’ve been applied to the active page/document.
One other cause for a slow InDesign is if you’re working over a network and the “pipes are clogged” … slow connections, slow ports, overloaded router, underpowered server. Even if the ID file in on your local drive, if you’ve placed images from the server, then redrawing the high res previews or something could slow things down. The way to test is to copy everything to your local computer and see if that makes a difference. (To copy links scattered over the network, select them all in the Links panel and choose Utilites > Copy Links To .. from the Links panel menu, pointing it to a folder on your local hard drive.)
@Issac: Thanks! Fixed.
Not sure I agree with your Font Activation unless your talking about plugins in indesign itself.
I find that FontExplorer X Pro is a God sent.
Would not be without its auto activation saves me lots of time every day.
Other then that I agree with you about PreFlight, I have actually had that crashing indesign CS4 constantly and finished up just leaving it off until job was ready for checking.
Live screen redraw was a big problem when moving jobs that had lots of images in them until i turned greeking on for pictures when scrolling.
Thanks for the tips, great post
It helps if you “save as” your file. In many cases you get very smaller file.
One way to make InDesign a lot faster on moderately equipped machines is to break up long documents into books made of several InDesign files. I once (long time ago) worked on a 240 page file on a computer with around 512 MB of RAM. Without the book feature, every dialog box would always take several seconds to open.
Another personal observation from that era is also that Mac OS X is/was quite a bit more responsive and stable than Windows XP when system memory is close to full.
Yup – very nice post! Thank you!
Another idea is to use LD files in project – just relink to HD in last phase, or break links at all (by rename folder with images) until print.
Memory: InDesign is a 32-bit app and can only address 4 GB. So, if your machine isn’t doing anything else at the same time, there’s not much point to having more than 4GB for InDesign alone. (If other apps are resident and executing, then that can indeed help.)
Books/breaking up documents: Peter, I’d strongly caution against moving to an INDB Book in CS5.5 if you need to export them all together. There are some fairly nasty bugs that mess up your page numbering still out there in CS5.5 7.5.2.318, Only affecting books.
Also, InDesign does not do multi-core processing (with the exception of PDF export), so it can max out one core and leave three others sitting idle. Annoying. Maybe this will be fixed in CS6?
Cannot thank you enough for those tips. Everything runs fast and nice now. Merci!
BTW
There is another good question… :)
Why (and how it is possible) Indesign CS3 could work smooth and way faster.
I remember those days very well. Are new features are so memory hungry?
Well… Maybe this is caused by eyecandy (it is not actually) unneeded fancy skin, wide and wasting place top menu and tabs (!) Good for browser, not DTP tool – someone forget ctrl + ~ shortcut to jump to another open windows. Dunno how others, but I work with just one project at once… So not need tabs. Should be as an option, same as skinning. IMHO
i’d add the following:
1. using the span columnes feature makes IND very very slow.
2. using long stories. i’m trying to cut stories so they won’t be longer than 50 pages. and less is even better.
3. sometimes it’s a faulty file. exporting to IDML and then opening it may fix some of the slowness.
Thank for the tips, David! I’ve noticed that since CS5, the apps are total resource hogs. If I “forget” to close InDesign (or Photoshop or Illustrator) at the end of the day, it is impossible to work in it the next day without quitting. And I have to admit that I must force quit more times than not, otherwise I’d be waiting up to 10 minutes. This is my biggest problem, so I guess it’s not really that the app is slow, but all my users complain daily. Ugh.
I also run Universal Type Server and have the Client auto-activate. It never seemed to slow me down in CS4 and lower, so I wonder if it could be the culprit in 5.5?
See you at Pepcon!
Merci!
@Blatner: Additionally we’re facing another issue called ‘InDesign Hanging’ especially while setting ‘Keep options’ in the CS5.5 template. We need to start discussing this issue too.
I don’t know who is Adobe making this new software for… Emo kids, who need to be visually attracted?
I bet pro guys demand f-a-s-t and stable performance, not plethora of background tasks that report weather all around the globe and predict SuperBowl finals. Damn, I’d like InD. to look like PageMaker. Ugly. And if I need some extra feature, I can manually turn it on. InD. 5.5 is worst piece of software I worked with for few years. I think lack of competition makes Adobe lazy.
Switch off “Always Save Preview Images with Documents”. It helps a lot, especially when drawing paths, moving text frames etc.
Strange, but it looks that Preview is generated in background every time you change something in layout, so it slows InDesign significantly.
Down side: you don’t have previews in Bridge :(
Where Do I find ‘Always Save Preview Images with Documents’ option. I’m a very beginner of ID. Plz help me to find out. :)
It is in Preferences -> File Handling
Another big one: if any of your text frames has “balance columns” turned on, it will make things slower, especially if there are anchored objects.
Another slowdown I find is humungously large multi-page tables, especially if applying some kind of formatting to a column. Sorry, no workaround though
1. GREP styles can slow a document down to a cawl. Avoid them if you can.
2. Since InDesign reads and writes files all the time, keeping your hard disk defragged makes a difference. Especially defraggers that sort directories together.
Peter
Book.
Is this true about bad bugs concerning Book in 5.5?
We use Book heavily and are currently using CS5.
I am mostly still impressed with the speed of ID, currently using 8GB ram on an 2.8 i5 imac, and I usually have PS and AI open at the same time.
Still good to know where to look if we do get problems.
The article is very helpful ?and so the comments. But there is something wrong here…
To keep ID responsive one should avoid or reduce the use of long stories, indexes, cross-references, preflight tool, high resolution images, high resolution screen redraw, balanced columns, spanned paragraphs, GREP styles, keep options, and previews saved into INDD file.
Although not cited, other resources are also guilty of slow performance when used in average-to-intensive frequency: contextual text, transparencies, effects, hyphenated text with multiple languages, complex text wraps, and multiple-level large TOCs.
In other words, to make ID run comfortably one have to use it just as an improved PageMaker and not as InDesign itself. Let me add that by “InDesign itself” I mean a powerful, elegant solution designed to produce high-quality publications in an integrated workflow with other graphic- and text-production tools.
Don’t you think the application is becoming excessively complex, bloated with unreasonable workflow? Its 56 panels and huge learning curve became intimidator as one can note by the reactions of newbies in ID classes. No big improvement was made on workflow during recent upgrades, not to mention the frozen support to long document resources.
Of course, ID is the end of a productive line and it has to handle several kinds of data. No application could be really simple with such a target. But I still think ID could be less bloated. Maybe the approach brought by these simpler apps developed for tablets could help future improvements on complex desktop applications as ID.
Put simply, to make ID run smoothly one have to limit the resources used with the program, and this is not a good signal.
@Igor: While I agree that Adobe needs to do more work to make InDesign faster and reliable (especially across multiple documents in a book), I think it is important to point out that: All these features work fine in InDesign for many people. There are many users who never experience slow-downs with x-refs or preflight!
I am definitely not saying you should avoid these features. Use them! But if you are experiencing slow-downs, then these are areas where you should look for possible solutions.
Monitoring the situation in Task Manager said that ID used only 1 Core of 4 in my Intel i5 CPU on text processing (100% on 1 Core, 0% 3 others). When I monitored Photoshop (for example) all 4 Cores in use.
Thanks for the article David!
I think you can also mention if you link to files in your document that are on a slow medium (slow usb-stick, network share (especially AFP windows shares on a mac).
Thanks again,
Mike.
Ah, if I only I could keep to shorter stories and do without features! My bread and butter is work with 400 page plus books, often illustrated, with lots and lots of footnotes. I have so many workarounds: turn off the preflight tool, turn off keep options (minimum two lines top and bottom of page for both text and footnotes) and plan to go back and break footnotes manually later, break the file into pieces, change display settings, closer look at client-furnished art or fonts . . . In some of these projects I have lost hours of work in the past when ID stalls out and crashes. Over the last few weeks it no longer crashes, but after stalling goes directly to an error 5 “cannot be recovered” status, not just for the file I’m working on but for any other ID file open at the same time. This means my newest workaround is saving every ten minutes, once to an external hard disk with one name, once to the local disk with another name.
This is crazy. I love ID and what I really want is for it to do what I need it to do without so many workarounds, without having to predict what various features will do to complicate processing. I don’t think my work is all that exotic, so this is obviously a problem for a lot of users. I think of the general problem as a “heavy file” problem. As soon as you ask a lot of it, it can’t seem to cope. Now I am trying to decide between expensive solutions: upgrade to 5.5, even though some of my clients are not there yet? upgrade to a new computer with more RAM (I have 4GB on an older iMac, but I’ve been waiting for a new iMac to come out)? both? I’ll do what needs done as long as I can be convinced it will help.
Once again, good one David! .
Hi Dave and AM,
Have you heard of a conflict between Apple’s SPACES and IND 5.5? When working across different softwares and programs ? and whilst waiting for a second monitor ? SPACES helps to create some illusion of order, but I have a funny feeling IND CS5.5 isn’t liking it. Have you heard of anything? I’ve had several crashes, slow response-rates (lag) and even files getting damaged. This is what our IT department is suggesting.
Thanks.
I tried all of the suggestions mentioned above, and finally gave in and called Adobe support. A frustrating 45 minutes later, they said there was nothing more they could do for me and closed my case.
This problem was not solved by the support program, however, I was finally able to solve it myself, and it was not: 1. too many images in the file, 2. too high a resolution display, or 3. corrupted preferences (all of which were suggested by the support personnel).
InDesign was performing in a jerky fashion, and placement of the cursor was impossible to control, and highlighting and assigning styles had a 2 to 5 second delay. The problem proved to be some kind of corruption on a Master page (and any other Masters based on the offending one) applied to these sections of this particular document. Once I changed the items on the Master page, the performance issues disappeared.
I mention this in hopes that it will help the next user who confronts this problem.
I had the same problem in InDesign 5.5 where it took a long time for letters to appear after I typed them. I discovered that a cross reference link was the problem.
I had created a book with seven chapters. Chapter one had a cross reference link to a page in chapter 7. Then, if I opened chapter one by itself, so that it was the only chapter open, when I typed, the letters appeared very slowly. However, as soon as I also opened chapter 7 (i.e., the chapter that chapter 1 had a cross-reference link to), everything was normal again. I could type and the text appearred immediately like it should.
I wanted to share my experience and add to this very helpful discussion. I work a lot in the Middle East version of InDesign, which enables working with text in right-to-left languages like Arabic. I have been producing a series of 16-page documents…. nothing crazy, each with only one high-res image. Laying out the original English version gave me no trouble. The French version of the same document started slowing down. The Spanish version became sluggish. And finally the Arabic version was unbearably slow. Merely applying a character style to a single word would give me the spinning beach ball for 45 to 65 seconds. A full minute to apply a character style! My system has 8GB of RAM and a super speedy SSD drive. It didn’t make any sense.
I went through all the suggestions listed in this thread, to no avail. Finally the layers panel caught my eye. I had set up the template with a base layer that contained components that would be in every language version. Then I made a second layer that contained the text. It was a pretty simple setup. On a whim I decided to put everything in the troublesome Arabic document on a single layer, and I trashed the now empty layer. Et voila! Everything returned to the normal speed. Now applying a character style happens almost instantaneously.
Whew. I am definitely relieved, but this was incredibly frustrating. InDesign does indeed feel unnecessarily bloated and heavy. It would be wonderful if the Adobe engineers devoted time to optimizing the application for speed and responsiveness. It needs to be more efficient and *feel* more efficient. Why shouldn’t I be able to use multiple layers in an Arabic document without getting bogged down?
I really liked your blog post.Really thank you! Awesome.
I have same issue. I packaged to desktop and now it is much much faster. I turned on greeking too and it helped.
I suspect our server was to blame maybe it is slow. We have macs but have a pc server….I’m wondering if that matters
Well, I followed all of the article and deep into the suggestions. When I made a blank Chapter and placed the text from the SLOW chapter into the new blank chapter and then replaced the SLOW chapter with the new one, the problem ceased!
The problem was this: when I would TYPE a few characters of a word, the text would show one character per second or two. It was typing too slowly to get any editing done! So, I tried everything and then the last thing is the first thing that actually worked.
There must be a corrupt file or corrupt Chapter potential with InDesign CS5.
What about GREP styles included in my styles?
Are they also a problem?
We are using InDesign CS6. I have created a new Preflight Profile, but when I have to restart my computer in the morning, The new Profile no longer exists.
How do I create the new profile (the one I always used in CS5) so that it doesn’t get removed?
Rok,
Late to the party, but GREP styles should not be a factor.
I use a _ton_ of GREP styles, often using horrible inefficient regexes that total about 2,000-3,000 characters, and don’t see InDesign so much as stutter.
But stuff like Balance Columns, on the other hand, can kill a top-of-the-line workstation when entering text on a 5-page document with no images. Like the one I’m working on right now that brought me to this page. :D
What a shame about GREP styles causing InDesign to slow to the point where it becomes useless.
Applied my first GREP style to change all digits in a long (40k words) document to small caps (old style figures). The slowdown was disturbing and immediate. Then I found this post. When I removed the GREP style InDesign started to function properly again.
I?ll have to find another solution to achieve this, as I work with these kind of documents daily and have to make this kind of change to match my client?s style.
I wonder if a GREP find and replace would work, although I?ve yet to figure out how to replace every digit in a document with itself but in a different style.
@Jeff: I haven’t seen those kinds of slow-downs with grep styles, but perhaps you have a lot of digits. As for find/change, yes that would work fine: The trick is to search for any digit (in either the Text or GREP tab of find/change, and leave the “replace with” field blank. Then set the character style up in the Formatting section (you may need to click More Options to see that). If the change to is blank, but formatting is being applied, then InDesign will leave the text as is and just apply the formatting (the character style, in this case).
Im working on book files which contain more than 50 documents.
then I have one file which is linked to each one of them by hyperlinks.
Working on this last file is a real pain as INDD is constantly updating the numbers (as you said) therefore opening each file for sure helps however, isn’t there a way to simply deactivate this feature of constantly checking?
@David: I guess, typically, 400 data tables accounts for a lot of digits. I ran a test file earlier using ‘\d’ in ‘Find’ and leaving ‘Replace’ blank, but setting the format to the required character style. It worked perfectly.
I then ran it on a full production document and it was quicker at changing all digits than it normally takes me to find and replace one.
Thanks a lot! This saved me from throwing my pc out the window. Turns out my problem was the multiple file cross-references!
Don’t know what crappy coding is behind it, but my guess is that indesign keeps opening and closing the references documents in the background ALL THE TIME.
If I open ALL documents that are referred to in the background then everything is zippy as can be, no slowdown at all. When I close them again I can drink a few cups of coffee before my sentence arrives on screen.
Anyone knows if this is better with CS6?
We recently upgraded our office from CS3 to CS6 ? and the smallest thing is slowing me down the most. I’m fast with keyboard shortcuts, and the action of hitting T to get to the text tool and the command-A for select all is sooo slow, if I don’t watch it I have to sometimes resort multiple times to my friend Command-Z. My display performance is set at typical, preflight off ? I’d appreciate further suggestions.
@Della: Weird. You can also switch to type tool slightly faster by double-clicking the text frame with the selection tool. Does that help?
Thanks, David ? I worked too long hitting a letter to get to the tool, I don’t think I can change now! But it makes very, very little difference. The hold-up seems to be more in the selecting all text. Is there no preference to “speed up keyboard actions” or some sort? I’m vaguely remembering something like that in Quark. And tips I’ve gathered in perusing forums seem to lead to cross-references ? but I’m not sure how to delete them, or turn them off! Thanks.
I have good results by doing a ‘save as’ and writing over the original file. This cuts down the bloat in the file, reduces the file size. Response time is faster.
Some great info here.
My experience was a super slow response between typing text and seeing it appear in the story.
I have a single column text frame which is linked over about 20 pages with many inline images. I had tried many of the suggestions noted here but nothing worked.
Surprisingly what solved the problem was View > Extras > Show Text Threads The wierd thing was that after noticing editing speeds were back to normal, they remained speedy after Hide Text Threads.
Seems the process of showing the linked text frames has reset the document so speed is back to normal…
if you have a layout with a lot of images, just have to save them like photoshop EPS and voila! Indesign fast again.
In my case, mountain lion on macbook pro retina 15, hiding rulers helped so much on slow scrolling issue on indesign cc 9.1.
Worth mentioning, and I have not seen much on this. My problem was from Text Wrap set to a Photoshop path. The offending ps file had a very complex path with tons of points. Changed that text wrap to the box instead and the s l o w r e d r a w went away. I would think this could also have a cumulative affect if you use a lot of text wraps set to Photoshop paths. Hope this helps someone!
Hiya, if you are having the same problem I had when resizing anything or moving objects about, there is a computational bug with the control panel and the transformation panels that are giving you real time changes to the sizing and position parameters. This is slowing down the whole process as the program calculates and displays the changes. Close these two panels and bing, the jumpy pauses are gone.
Hope this helps as it was driving me up the wall, Indesign CC on a brand new iMac 16gb of RAM. It shouldn’t be.
Adobe needs to address this.
Cheers, Anthony
Hi there,
ID_CC it is REALLY a pain! It is SO slower than CS4, 5 or 6; My machine has a overclocked i7, win64 and 24Gb Ram, so don’t blame my hardware!!! I’m not really a programmer, but I guess that the real reason could be this: in Photoshop (CS6 and CC) Adobe stated they began to use Mercury Engine, which is a set of video display routines relying on GPU (the processor of the video card) instead than CPU; it is thus obvious that the ‘fluidity’ or overall speed of the software is related to the power of the GPU and the way GPU (videocard) and CPU (main processor) communicate each other. On the old versions of the softwares (Photoshop, InDesign etc) I think they did tricks and shortcuts to circumvents bottlenecks and speed up the whole stuff; and they worked as hell. But these tricks must change each time OS (Win and Mac) are updated or changed; programmers have to re-write huge portions of code each time and in this age of ‘spending rewiev’ even Adobe prefers to rely on something quicker and cheaper but somewhat less performant… Someone should investigate this with Adobe and tell them to bring back the speed we need!
bye
Adobe is aware that there are problems with a small number of InDesign CC users. For those people it is very frustrating. The CC 9.1 update fixed the problem for some users, but not everyone apparently. They continue to investigate. Some people say it is better when all the panels are closed (press Tab or Shift-tab).
So would I notice an improvement if I replaced my GT120 graphics card with a GTX 680? Because I keep reading that 2D programs can’t take advantage of all the 3D hardware on newer cards…?
Hi, everyone,
Just wanted to tell you my observations on the “speed” of the welcome screen of InDesign and its connection to the internet available:
1. If I disable the network adapter of the computer everything goes extreamly quick;
2. If I connect my hi-speed internet, it takes like half a second beeing blank before showing its content;
3. If I connect to internet via my mobile phone, it takes like 1-2 seconds;
4. If I connect to a rooter, which has no connection to internet this blank screen can last for more than 10 seconds.
You can quickly and thoroughly preflight InDesign CC files with the patented preflighting software, FlightCheck. For more information, visit https://markzware.com/products/flightcheck/
hi dave,
I apologize for the language, but english it’s not my first-choice.
They investigate? FBI, NYPD or LAPD should investigate; they should sell good stuff instead of rubbish. CC it is not the product we all expected. The REAL problem (to me) it is that when you SELL a product, you SHOULD sell something which works. If I buy a car, I expect that the car itself will exit the dealer’s yard while I’m driving; Adobe’s way, instead, is about buying a new car with a lot of problems having the dealer fixing ’em (maybe) in six month or so after engine blows up just past their doors.
It’s not nice ever that a company like Adobe charges a lot of money for a tool which does’t work well and uses precious people’s time to debug this stuff.
If you want to really understand why Adobe is lowering quality of it’s product, just read CREDITS of Indesign CS4 or CS5 and CC (everybody can do it, it’s fun!): all silicon valley american names are gone, replace by indian names. It is like you trade your Chevy Impala sedan or your Harley for a Tata pickup, man. Indians are great about philosophy and chackra, but not in mechanics or engineering. Germans are good in mechanics, not Inuit or Mexican. American WERE good in writing code, but huge companies discover that they can pay 1/10th or 1/100ds less to foreign people, so… It’s all a matter of cost, and Adobe has lowered it’s standard hiding a really poor engine under a nice GUI. Just missin’ ’95 and Pagemaker, buddy!
regards, paolo
Thank you! I was going crazy watching the cross-reference panel try to work for a 54 chapter book!
I’ve found ID CC a vast improvement for one reason: epubs. Suddenly it (almost) works straight out of ID. Indexes are possible, editing outside of ID is kept to a minimum. Happy days! However, the slow downs have started to occur in unusual places. A few versions back creating an index almost always seemed to crash the system. That no longer happens. Now the slow downs occur when synchronising book files and when exporting to epub. The time increases when ID has more images to process but the worst part is it isn’t just ID which slows down but my entire PC (Win8, Intel i7, 2.8ghz, 8gb RAM, 64-bit, plenty of spare disc space). At least nowadays I can tell that ID is doing something – the progress bar is reassuring – but as an inveterate multitasker it is frustrating!
Others may be aware of this issue, but when I move pages from one InDesign document to another, some type of link remains in place between the two that results in very slow editing of the document.
I have searched high and low for this link to no avail. When I do a move (or copy) I generally do not want the link. Anybody know how to break the link, or avoid it in the first place?
Not that I’ve seen it mentioned, but if I need to select and copy a bunch of text (Can be one page worth or 100 pages worth) indesign takes forever!! (Over 5 minutes) to do the copy to the clipboard. I use CTRL-C to do the copy (This is Windows CS5.5, btw). Any ideas?
InDesign running slow?
I have always had success with exporting to IDML files, then opening these IDML exports.
Typically it is a font issue that can slow InDesign to a crawl.
When I re-open one of these IDML exports, a find font error (that I am able to fix) dialog opens.
Once the errant font(s) are deleted or replaced, InDesign runs like a top. Also restart InDesign after the export.
I can only seem to find these problem fonts AFTER export to IDML.
Very strange…
I am running InDesign CS3 on an old 3.2Ghz Pentium (really) with a good graphics card and XP. I do run into some quite aggravating slowing. My file is presently 425Mb, 6,640 pages, 2,400+ 300 dpi linked images. It is a journal that I have been keeping for the last fifty-six years (I obviously didn’t always use InDesign – used pencil and paper for a long time into the late eighties). It is not so bad. I type most entries in Word and then copy and paste them to the current page of my file. Nearly the worst is when I edit old entries where InDesign thinks it has to re-paginate every time an image moves to the next page – takes three, four minutes sometimes. The worst is when I close. It can take five to seven minutes. Updating some indexes can take thirty minutes or longer (one has twenty-three thousand entries on over 600,000 pages). It can take many hours to count all the words and display them in the Info panel. thought you might find this interesting.
John W:
1. Is there a good reason for you having one document with 6640 pages? This will make ANY programme unstable, not just ID. Consider splitting your file into multiple files and then using an ID book document (go to File > New > Book) to order them correctly and maintain styles between them. You should read the Help documentation about book files and their functionality. You can even set the page numbering so that it doesn’t automatically update every page number (just the ones in the document you are working in) every time you move your images around – but then you must remember to do it manually later.
2. You should also look up how to Place documents (not cut and paste). It sounds like you are using techniques learned for Word but you have better alternatives in ID.
3. However good your PC + graphics card were when you bought them you would now benefit from an upgrade. Windows XP will no longer be supported by Microsoft from early 2014 – that means it is 10 years since they replaced it. It has since been replaced 3 times. Time to move on!
4. In the same vein, ID has now been upgraded several times. Even if you only upgraded to CS5 or CS6 you would see huge improvements. If you have any intention of turning your indexed journal into a reflowable ebook (for use on all modern e-readers) you’d seriously benefit from upgrading to Indesign CC (the latest version).
Inherited a 50ish page product catalogue in InDesign CC format. We have CC, but our MacPros are getting on a bit, and it’s a dog, so I saved the file as an idml and opened in CS5.5.
All fine, except any time I go to update ANYTHING in the links palette, it basically hangs for 30 seconds. What’s going on there? Everything is linked up fine. There are a combination of image locations (some local, some networked), and a combination of RGB/CMYK images (working my way through that, thinking happy thoughts about the originator of the document).
Anything I can do to make it behave normally?
Preflight can sometimes be your culprit. If you have it checked on or “live”, every time you place a new photo, preflight kicks in and re-checks your entire document. With a lengthy project, your document can sometimes hang up while preflight is working. Hopefully this helps. Good luck.
Still no change even with suggestions.
But can say the answer is revert to CS6 or wait for CC
to catchup with updates or like found out,
If machine is super cool, Indesign CC SUPER FAST.
Thanx for the help but put everything back
On.
Here is a chart of ways to speed up InDesign: https://creativepro.com/speeding-indesign-chart-ideas.php
Very helpful, thank you and the diagram designer.
A user that I work with has a document that contains 10 chapters. Each chapter is a threaded story. The document contains 380 pages
Editing throughout the document is fine except for one chapter (story). An edit in that story takes at least 30 seconds to process. This would include typing one letter, adding a space, etc.
This “slow story” does include a good bit of text that was copied and pasted from another InDesign document.
Is there some kind of link to the original document that is created when one does a copy and paste? Is it possible to break that link after it has been created?
In CC, I have found Locking objects brings InDesign to a crawl. We’re talking several minutes to move to the next action. If I accidentally lock an object, it will take a few minutes for the screen to redraw.
sound bizarre, but this is true, we are having the same problems here.
i pasted vector drawings from illustrator to indesign, i always do that.
now my colleague took over, and he locks those pasted vectors. when he does that, Indesign will get extremely slow. i checked 99 times, and if i unlock those objects, Indesign is back at full speed again. strange but true.
solution someone?
With all due respect, David, and first of all thanks for trying to help, and providing comments.
Things like the “speed up your inDesign” chart suggesting little workarounds are offensive and more than slightly apologist, as if Adobe is some open source volunteer effort and we should help them along. We’re not talking about video editing and compositing here, which my computer can also handle – we’re talking about simple fonts and static photos, and it should run smoothly and lightning fast by now, certainly as fast as it did 10 years ago. The truth is that they have a pricey monopoly, we don’t have any choice and Adobe is taking advantage of that fact.
The most convincing explanation I’ve read, from an insider, is that Adobe are cutting serious corners with the coding quality and just piling on features without designing for efficient code, because that would cost more.
I’ve been doing page layout since it was called “desktop publishing” and it is not my imagination that simple things like selecting a word with double-click are slower now (1/2 second delay! are you f*ing kidding me?) than with the original InDesign on a much slower Mac, not to mention being slower than in Quark on a freakin Mac SE. I believe the reason is simple: Adobe are cobbling together half-baked bloated code, skimping on paying for good code.
And it all goes back to market monopoly, the same reason Internet Explorer and even Office is a piece of crap. I would gladly use other software if it existed. I loathe the current ethos at Adobe, their contempt for my time.
I hear your frustration, Andrew, but the problem is that you are experiencing these things and I’m not. In fact, I think most InDesign users are not. Most InDesign users find ID as snappy as ever. I am sitting here using IDcc and there’s virtually zero delay when selecting text. But some users do have problems. Sometimes it’s their documents, sometimes it their systems… it’s very hard to know.
That sounds legit enough, David, except that “why is indesign so slow” is one of the top search terms for Indesign on google, for pete’s sake.
It would be easy for Adobe to sleuth out the problem if they wanted to – there are more than enough posters on the Adobe forums themselves, people with new systems complaining of dragginess, to constitute a quorum for investigation. If open source coding efforts can take into account a significant user bug experiences, and those developers are not even being paid, the Tesla-driving MBA’s in charge of Adobe these days can certainly do the same, if they’d look up from their balance sheets. Adobe’s attitude towards users has been supercilious and oblivious for years, I have a long memory.
I’m glad you’re not having issues, and from the looks of it we’re of a similar vintage, but I have to ask, are you sure you haven’t just gotten used to draggy performance? A lot of my friends have.
I am having an issue…My Indesign Program keeps on coming up with an “out of memory” error
Mac Preferences:
iMac 27-inch, Late 2013 Start up Disk: Macintosh HD Processor: 3.5 GHz Intel Core i7 Memory: 32 GB 1600 MHz DDR3 Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 775M 2048 MB Software: OS X 10.9.3 (13D65)
I have PLENTY of RAM…I know that cant be the issue..
Cassandra: I would try rebuilding preferences (see the article above for info on how). If it keeps happening, write something on the Forums (which more people will see than this blog post)
Thanks for the efforts David
Just to add data to the quest for understanding, my slow screen redraw began as soon as I turned “Proof Colors” on.
Everything was instantaneous on the same document before that. InDesign immediately began a very slow redraw when I chose “Proof Colors”, and redraw has been slow on that document since. I can reproduce the issue if I go back to an earlier version and choose “Proof Colors” again.
My system is pretty robust, so some of the possible causes are ruled out.
(See system and document info below)
I agree with Andrew that performance and reliability are my most wished for software features. Though, CC 2014 has been a pretty smooth upgrade for me so far.
Cheers
Tom
System info:
Adobe CC 2014, Mavericks 10.9.3
iMac Late 2013 (3.5GHz, i7)
RAM: 32 GB
Video: 4 GB RAM (GTX 780M)
Storage: 1 TB SSD plus 6TB RAID 0 Thunderbolt drives.
Document info:
Profile: Web
Color Policy: sRGB
Proof Profile: sRGB
Layers: 9 (Some layers locked) (I rarely work with more than 3 layers)
Apps Running: Adobe Ps, Ai, Id, Br
I have a theory!!!!
I believe it’s In-designs incapability to utilize the all the RAM and other hardware.
I’m currently running an
i7-2600 @3.4ghz CPU
32gb ddr3 1600mhz corsair vengance RAM
120gb intel SSD
2x 500gb segate 7200rpm HDD
GTX 660 2gb.
windows 7 ultimate SP1 64bit.
When looking in the task manager In-design never uses much ram despite having 32gb or so to play with.
Another observation in the task manager is the ram allocation fluctuates and my network usage runs high when zooming in and out of a page.
this leads me to believe In-design doesn’t store linked images in the ram for a long time and keeps referring to the source file (in my case a NAS Drive). could this be due to the scratch disk being almost full or is it just because Indesign need to keep referring to the source of the linked image.
Related problem: Anyone seeing Indesign CC launching extremely slowly the first time, then much faster after quitting and relaunching? On my Macbook Pro 2.53 ghz Core 2 Duo, initial launch takes more than 4 minutes. After quit, a relaunch takes 25 seconds.
that is probably to do with your hard drive cache or ram. best upgrade to an ssd
Hi Their,
I have a PC with configuration i72600K 16GB ram,128GB SSD,1TB HD 7200RPM.using software’s coreldraw x6,indesign cs6,illu cs6 but still the application are working very slow.so plz suggest me the best configuration so that i can use these apps simultaneously without loosing the speed.and i am planning to configure intel xeon with dual processor with 12 cores.so is it ok or not
Santosh,
You already have a fast machine, adding dual processors won’t help. If you allocate too much RAM in Photoshop, it won’t be available for other apps, you might want to check your settings.
I’m working on a big ID CS6 project, with hundred pages of text and linked images. Using a slight amount of cross-references, and a few conditions. Maximum document length is 150 pages, all binded in a book.
I’m shocked at the slowness of ID. The spinning ball appears even when typing. Documents are continuosly opened and closed in the background. The program crashes every two hours or so. I did everything described in this and other discussions, but there is no way to improve things.
I don’t want to go back to FrameMaker, since it is a real pain. But ID is really unusable as it is. I’m starting to dream the day I’ll stop releasing documentation in the form of a traditional book, and be able to get rid of this thing.
Paolo
I must add: I’ve worked on similar projects with PageMaker in the past. Never experienced something like this. Call it progress!
One of the reasons that make ID so slow seems to be the amount of hidden objects in the file. For example, if you imported a text file, then cut and pasted part of it in a text frame, and then deleted the imported file sitting on the workbench, it seems that this text is still contained inside the ID file.
I could discover this by looking at the Structure pane, where these hiddn text files/stories could be seen thank to the tags associated with the paragraph styles. By removing these hidden stories, the ID file become smaller, and there is less need to reformat when opening a file.
I have a lot of hidden linked pictures as well. While they are not embedded, I guess they take computing time when everything has to be set. Shame I could not find a way to remove them from the Link pane.
Paolo
If your InDesign document has been packaged, try deleting the “Document Fonts” folder from within the folder your file resides. I have found several times that InDesign has some sort of battle with the system over where the font resides.
I’m using CS6 / Win7
I have multiple documents in ID CC, with multiple anchored objects, and placed images. The docs range in size, but the biggest may be around 40 pages. There are 200 pg in all – I did not book them together, they each are individual. Yet, whenever I want to print a file, it takes several hours to flatten and print.
My images are placed from a remote location, (my job uses networks and a cloud to bridge across a few buildings), if that matters at all. I do not suppose it does.
I have 8GB ram, and a terrabyte of storage, as well as several remote drives with terrabytes each.
What can I do to make printing more palatable? Especially with a boss who likes frequent printouts. . .?
Not sure if anybody mention this:
My document gets crazy slow when I have the “Pages” panel enabled. The rendering of all the page thumbnails seems to slow down ID dramatically. When hiding this panel or disabling preview thumbnails, ID works fine again.
I’m at my wits end. My InDesign was running just FINE up until the last update. Now it takes 3-10 seconds to do ANYTHING, even nudging a simple small text field. This goes for all of my documents, even new ones, and takes almost 10 minutes just to open up the program. None of the things listed in this article apply to me. Now I have just lost a job because of this and am concerned I’m about to lose another. :( :( :( Tried closing all my tabs… virtually no improvement. Will Adobe be offering any discounts/credits toward CC members for this?
I found a bit of a bug in Indesign i hope this can help a few people.
If you have sluggish performance make sure you haven’t got any placed PDF’s and AI files.
I wish that were the case with me. Unfortunately, InDesign is sloooooow even if I don’t have any documents open. :(
What OS are you using? What computer spec have you got? How much free primary storage space do you have? (if you are using a Standard mechanical hard drive make sure you have at least 50% free and do a defrag) what is your workflow proccess? If you have bugs maybe try uninstalling all adobe products using Adobe removal kit, then re install them could be some corrupt libraries on your machine.
I tried “Display Quality” the “Preflight” to no avail, but deleting the lone cross-document cross reference returned me to normal speed!
er, “Display Quality” *and* “Preflight”
I’ve been able to get back a tremendous amount of speed to InDesign by unplugging my tablet. I’m glad for the speed, but now I have to get through using a basic mouse.
I came to a literal crawl on a short document I was wokring on, seeing the dreaded beachball of death efter almost every charatcer typed, saw a suggestion about switching GREP off by adding an * before the GREP code, I did that but it didn’t do anything, then I actually deleted all the GREP styles and it is back to normal speed now.
Very diassapointing, they really should be embarrassed.
Hi. I had a problem with a magazine what I created, InDesign became extremely slow.. Every single task caused a spin-ball.. It was pretty strange.. then I came here to find some solution to my problems and when I read this article I did realized that I have a lot of hyperlinks to external websites and when hyperlinks palette is turned on then each task cause 30 seconds spin-ball, the solution is simple.. hide the hyperlinks palette and then everything back to normal :)