InDesign crashed for no reason. Why??

November 2, 2006 9:11 AM

Was working on an InDesign file, and i just up and crashed. Now it's corrupted, as are the saved copies.

I was working on an InDesign document last night, and all of a sudden the linked images (about 12 per page, 4 pages) disappeared. Closed InDesign, and now it crashes when I reopened the file. I have copies of the file (saved after the images turned to gray boxes), but those also cause InDesign to "crash unexpectedly". I really do not want to recreate all four pages, so is there a way to recover at least some of the file? This was Indesign CS, on Mac OS X 10.3.9 G5. I also have access to CS on Win XP, CS 2 on Win XP, and CS 2 on OS X 10.4.8 Intel iMac.

Yes, I have thrown away pref files, and checked Adobe's web site.

posted by niles to computers & internet (8 comments total)

The problem may be corrupted IDCS preferences, and not the file itself. You can delete the old prefs file by holding down a combination of control keys - I forget which, but you should just be able to hold down shift+ctrl+option+open apple and launch the app. This will prompt you to delete the prefs. Also, try deactivating much of your non-system type when you do that. If it works, then open your file from w/in the app, save as exchange, and reopen with type loaded again - hopefully this will salvage the file. Email me if I can help.
posted by luriete at 9:24 AM on November 2, 2006

(I had this problem regularly with IDCS, but never with CS2; you can try opening the files in CS2, that might fix 'em too.)
posted by luriete at 9:25 AM on November 2, 2006

Try CS2 and opening them on other platforms first. Then disable your system fonts and try again.

Otherwise... don't know what to tell you. Adobe, despite having a great product, is kind of a turd of a company with poor software management practices. When you get apps as complex as the CS and CS2 products are, bad coding practices mean horrible, weird, destructive bugs for the end user.
posted by SpecialK at 9:31 AM on November 2, 2006

Yeah, holding down shift+ctrl+opt+cmd prompted me to delete the file. I disabled fonts as well, but no dice. CS2 doesn't like the file either...


Any other thoughts?
posted by niles at 9:35 AM on November 2, 2006

Could one of your images be corrupt? Try resaving them all. Or try moving them to a different folder so that ID can't "see"them. Try it on all the copies of your file.

Stupid quesiton: can you open other InDesign documents ok? Just checking to see if it's an ID problem or a problem with that specific document.

Try opening in CS2.

After a while, these things reach a point where it's just quicker to recreate them. In the future, try saving file as a pdf when you're working on it also, so that you have it another format in case of problems. Remember PDFs can often be successuflly open by Illustrater.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 9:37 AM on November 2, 2006

Brandon: I couldn't open other files until I trashed the prefs. Is that a symptom of anything? I just tried moving the images, but it doesn't seem to help

Special K: I did try on the other systems, and they all agree that the file "may be corrupted". I do have a (very, very, very) earlier file, so I suppose I'll recreate this.

Thanks for the ideas, guys.
posted by niles at 9:45 AM on November 2, 2006

This happened to me on a single page of a catalog once, it was absolutely infuriating. There was nothing I could do but recreate it from scratch, as every time I'd open any iteration of the document it would crash in the same fashion. Pretty interesting, considering it had been opened and versioned about 20 times before then... their forums and support center had no suggestions either. Wheee!
posted by prostyle at 10:20 AM on November 2, 2006

The one time I had a file get corrupted on me I was able to get around it by exporting (File -> Export...) as an InDesign Interchange File. If you can't do it in CS before it crashes, see if you can get someone with a copy of CS2 to do it for you.
posted by lekvar at 1:33 PM on November 2, 2006