Participant

Question

InDesign CS5 Slow Screen Redraw

Forum|Forum|15 years ago
June 18, 2010
17 replies
23480 views

I've upgraded from the CS4 Suite to CS5. InDesign is almost impossible to use, the screen redraw is painfully slow. Much slower than CS4, which was instantaneous. Anyone at Adobe want to clue us in to what's going on? And yes, Live Update is off. This is an awful step backwards.

Running 20 gigs of ram.

Hardware Overview:

Model Name: Mac Pro

Model Identifier: MacPro3,1

Processor Name: Quad-Core Intel Xeon

Processor Speed: 3.2 GHz

Number Of Processors: 2

Total Number Of Cores: 8

L2 Cache (per processor): 12 MB

Memory: 20 GB

Bus Speed: 1.6 GHz

Boot ROM Version: MP31.006C.B05

SMC Version (system): 1.25f4

Serial Number (system): G88353AXXYL

Hardware UUID: C3C1BADF-FE59-5880-B735-A2FB4549BDDC

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Anonymous

Turning off this preference fixed the CS5 slowness problem for us...

InDesign > Preferences > File Handling > Disable "Always Save Preview Images with Documents"

A

Anonymous

I encountered this problem on my i Mac 2.4 HHz Intel Core 2 Duo with 4 GB ram when working with objects within an ID document. Shutting off LS Drawing helped slightly. I moved the project on to my brand new macbook pro - same issue although shutting off LS Drawing helped agin to a greater degree. This cannot therfor be a configuration issue as some suggest - but a funamental ID problem. I am considering dumping ID for Quark - we will see!

D

Dory Colbert

Participating Frequently

I had this frustrating problem for months. But it was fixed by the Adobe InD CS5 patch released on Apr 26, 2011. Finally. One of the bug fixes in that patch was for slow screen redraw. I'm now running InDesign 7.0.4 and it has been working normally since.

I read about people having this problem everywhere on forums: macs, PCs, old or new CPUs, variable OS's. I was backsaving to .idml files and starting over in CS4. Adobe support was unhelpful, although hours of my time were wasted. The good-intentioned people w/o the problem in the forums had less than useful advice. My InD CS5 was unusable.

But now it's great! Hope the patch helps you if you have not already tried it. I

Dory

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Grz10

Participant

I also have a brand new PC (see below for specs + 1GB ATI Radeon HD 5700), and i've had the same issues with InDesign. I found a couple of things that helped and I hadn't seen them mentioned - changing the 'screen mode' to anything but 'normal' (e.g. preview or bleed); and clearing (even disabling) 'object-level display settings.' I've also heard that NVIDIA >> ATI for design work, but I'm not sure if there's any truth to that.

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walker_riddley

Participant

Updated our office to CS5 - half of the systems ran InDesign wintout problems while others were painfully slow. After comparing all of the systems on the same file, was not able to determine the cause but did come across a work around for the slow systems after trying all of the things mentioned in this thread.

Our file had TIFs, PDF, EPS placed in it and we have made similar files in CS3 and CS4 without any issues of slowness. The activity monitor would jump to over 100% for InDesign CS5 when working with the file and causing all kinds of lag.

The fix was to turn of the thumbnails in the Pages panel (pull down the menu in the Pages tab, and then select Panel Options, then turn off the thumbnails in the master pages and the regular pages.

The activity monitor dropped immediately to 30-60% and there was no more lag.

This does not explain why on other systems the problem did not exist even when keeping live screen draw on immediate, Preflight on, and high quality display set - the unaffected systems all could handle the same file without slowness even with these features enabled.

I suspect the answer may lie in the graphics cards. Hope this helps.

R

RDP

Participating Frequently

Thanks for that feedbackI tried your suggestion with no change. I have tried replacing the graphics card in two machines, no change. I was working on a small job yesterday when the problem hit me again. This job had drop shadows applied to photoshop images, same problem as before. I deleted the drop shadow but that did not fix it, so I opened a new doc and pasted all the elements into the new page minus the photoshop images. I placed new photoshop images without drop shadow and ID runs fast. I have no doubt that ID has some sort of transparency issues that are somehow linked with other software.

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amaronee1

Participating Frequently

Merlin Man,

You are absolutely correct. Thank you for your insight. I tried all the settings suggestions herewith to no avail. Then, reading your post, I realized the doc giving me difficulty had an imported .png file with a drop shadow created in PS. PNG files preserve transparency. I removed that image and, viola! Running at speed again.

Many thanks, again, for your detective capes. I, too, wasted lots of time trying to get Adobe tech support. It took three calls -- put on hold, disconnected, etc.-- before I got an aloof Adobe CS rep in Some Distant Country, who had no insight into the problem and less appetite for a solution. Too bad Adobe isn't up to speed on their software. But they have no issues charging lots of $$ for it.

S

SteveUnit4

Participant

I just figured it out on my Mac, and it wasnt the redraw.

What was causing my Indesign to be sluggish, jerky, slow etc, was the fact that I had Embedded PDF created from Illustrator within my document. Deleted it and Brilliant, fast as anything now.

Will probably replace the PDF with EPS or Jpg now.

Steve

Peter Spier

Community Expert

You should PLACE the PDF (and anything else that is more than a few simple paths that you need to be able to edit) and leve it linked rather than embedding. I'd avoid .eps like the plague.

Andreas Jansson

Inspiring

Just adding a discovery of my own here, since it relates to slow and embedding:

My problems were caused by embedding XML files. Since embedded XML files are obviously not removed when deleting them from the XML structure, my problematic documents had hamstered hundreds (or even thousands) of small XML files inside of them. It then took a couple of seconds for InDesign to "respond" every time I switched to it from another program.

I have found no way to remove the old links, but have changed the script that makes use of the XML (which is fetched from a database), to link to the file instead of embedding (embedding seems to be default). This works fine.

But anyway, I would very much like to know how to get rid of all the orphaned XML files inside the documents... Shouldn't there be a way to delete them? They do not exist in the Links collection or panel, but they are reported as missing when using the search for missing links utilities.

InDesign CS4 handled these bad documents better – that's why I (or the customer) had not noticed it before we began using CS5.

Best regards, Andreas

A

Anonymous

We just deployed CS5 last month and the screen redraw problem in InDesign has been hurting our older Macs. It's most noticeable when a document contains a lot of independent linked graphics with drop shadows.

Unfortunately, the one thing I've found that helps is to disable the Preview Image for Bridge. InDesign>Preferences>File Handling> Disable "Always Save Preview Images with Documents". That makes a big difference with our documents and we don't have to tap down the Display Performance past "Typical". I say it's unfortunate because our Design staff absolutely loves Bridge and it kills them to have to lose a feature like that.

R

RDP

Participating Frequently

Hi Robb,

Thanks for the tip, I'll try it out.

Rob

R

RDP

Participating Frequently

Hi Robb,

Thats has improved the speed quite a bit, by about 75% I would say.

Thanks for the tip.

Now all we need is for Adobe to leave iPod & iPhone alone for 5 minutes and fix these basic problems....

J

jamiecottrell

Participant

Hi

This is a simple thing that helped me with this issue. Under preferences > display perfomance > adjust view settings, select each of the view settings and click "use defaults". This seems to have fixed it for me.

Hope this helps.

R

RDP

Participating Frequently

Thanks Jamie but already tried that.

So far I have increased the RAM to 12gig, installed an ATI Radeon 5870 card.

Most of the issues have now been fixed but I am still pulling my hair out

with the slow response to moving picture boxes. It would be interesting if

you had the same issues as my two Mac Pro's have. When moving the picture

boxes the bezier handles are delayed just as if you had set the settings in

"Interfaces" - "options" Live Screen drawing set to delayed. For me, the

difference between all three settings is that the picture vanishes on

delayed and remains on instant, but the bezier handles are delayed on all

settings. The annoying thing is that if I move the mouse too soon and before

the beziers appear, the picture follows the mouse.

R

RDP

Participating Frequently

Apple have released a fix for graphic display issues and this has fixed the same CS5 problem I had. Here is the link http://support.apple.com/kb/DL1083

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Ulrich Bogun

Participant

In my case, where the Mac Pro was using about 100% of one thread, allowing me coffee breaks between each two clicks of about one minute length while InDesign was "busy" updating the document and its palettes, I noticed that I could work the first few seconds after opening each document. Then several started to slow ID down incredibly.

I switched off real-time spellchecking and can now work with live redraw, high res pictures and all that nifty stuff without any delay. Funny: Some documents always worked with spellchecking on, some – with the same settings for language and spellchecking – brought ID to the knees.

J

jpmilot

Participant

converting my .eps into .psd helped a lot.

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