Participant

Question

Bug: InDesign does not export all linked images to PDF Files Update 20.1

Forum|Forum|1 year ago
February 5, 2025
3 replies
352 views

Hello,

We have made a small change to the text of a document for a customer. After we had exported the document as an interactive PDF and sent it to the customer, we received a complaint: Why are flags missing on some pages.

This document contains flags on several pages. The flags are all contained in a single .ai file on different artboards, which are then linked in InDesign. Everything looks good in InDesign: The links are all up to date and the preview is displayed correctly: no warnings, no errors during export. After the export to PDF, (not all only) some flags are missing.

Re-linking the flag file did not help. Only when we duplicated the flag file unchanged in Explorer and linked this copy of the flag file again did it work again.

The only difference to the last revision is an InDesign update to 20.1. On another computer with Indesign 19 all flags are exported.

The consequence: I pay a lot of money for professional software and still stand in front of my customers like an idiot because standard functions don't work reliably. From now on, I have to check all exported PDF files for completeness before they go out to the customer because I can no longer trust InDesign.

Who will pay for the extra work? My customers, me or Adobe?

Sorry for the drastic wording, but I'm very upset because it's not the only problem I've had with Adobe products recently. And fortunately I have better things to do than do unpaid bug reporting for Adobe.

Thank you for fixing this problem.

leo.r

Community Expert

in addition to other questions: does it happen when exporting to normal (print) PDF, not interactive?

Robert at ID-Tasker

Legend

@684486515486bg

Any chance you could try exporting this ddocument from 20.0.1 or 20.0?

This would tell us if it's a bug in v 20 or subsequent updates?

6

684486515486bgAuthor

Participant

I'll try to test thin in some day and come back to you.

Mike Witherell

Community Expert

Hello 684486515486bg

In my experience across the years, if a linked graphic is going to misbehave, it is going to be an .AI file.

My first efforts at troubleshooting will be to open the .ai file in Illustrator and Save-As to a new file name.

Then I relink that to the InDesign document and test.

Now here is my viewpoint:

I feel it is everyone's quality control responsibility to have a careful look at any and every PDF iteration. That includes the InDesign operator and the client and the commercial printer's prepress people. It seems like every time any of us get in a hurry with 1 last quick change, a mistake like this can occur. This makes everyone upset, and in some cases lead to big money expenses. At least your client caught it. But I believe that all parties should take a moment to look over the whole job carefully and patiently before committing to a press run. Since your file was an interactive PDF, maybe printing wasn't wasted. Altogether, I just want to emphasize the importance of the ever-important role of Quality Control practices. I often remind people that 99.9% of everything published will have a mistake in it that no one noticed. The art of QC practices is to catch the biggest of them. It makes me wish that there was an InDesign plug-in that measured the number of mistakes discovered and fixed along the way to producing a final copy, just for the "politics" of the matter.

Mike Witherell

Robert at ID-Tasker

Legend

[...] It makes me wish that there was an InDesign plug-in that measured the number of mistakes discovered and fixed along the way to producing a final copy, just for the "politics" of the matter.

By @Mike Witherell

You could use Notes - built-in option - for that.

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