InDesign CS6 crashes during PDF export

I realize that this is an old post, but the ONLY time InDesign CS6 crashes for me when exporting to PDF is when I import (for whatever reason) a Quark-distilled PDF into InDesign and then try to export to PDF.

AGAIN...that's the ONLY time InDesign crashes for me on export to PDF.

How do I fix it?  Take the Quark PDF, export to PS, then distill the postscript file to a new PDF, which I then re-import into InDesign.

Never fails for me.  I hope this helps someone...

!My CS6 inDesign will not create a PDF for print, but will create an interactive.

I've tried deleting preferences - no joy.

I have created a new document with a few pages, each containing a text box or two - still fails.

I created a new document with one (1) page and one text box saying 'this is a document' - again same problem.

I'm running on an Apple 12" Macbook - 8 Gig, 512 Gig SSD, OSX 10.10.5, document on local drive.

I'm stumped.

I put a zip archive of the /tmp/*.log files, the Apple crash dump, test.indd, and an interactive PDF I created at https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/16707408/Diagnostic%20Dumps.zip

Any ideas?

Hi

I was having the same issue here, I solved it just launching Acrobat Pro X before Indesign CS6.

Saludos

Incredibly, this still seems to be an issue in 2015. Many thanks to Uwe Laubender's script, which worked perfectly first try!! I was exporting a 2-page file to PDF and having the problem of it never finishing. The file has quite a few instances of glow effects, but only 2 placed files. The final PDF is only 326kb, so I can't see file size or effects being an issue. Bizarre, but I am glad to have a fix with the script.

I occasionally find myself with a similar problem in CS6 when compiling all of my editorial pdf pages plus advertiser pdf pages into a new document for re-exporting (usually for the creation of a digital issue). I use this technique primarily because it is a good quick fix in a situation where each agency has exported their artwork on a different sized art board (making it difficult and time consuming to go through a combined pdf to crop each page to a uniform size).

As you have mentioned, when the export causes a crash, trying to locate a corrupt/ problem file in a document of over 150 pages is not that simple. It doesn't necessarily show up in any pre-flight check, and the ad has already been printed in the magazine without any issue. There is no obvious answer to the problem. It really is usually a case of going through all of the pages and exporting each one separately until Indesign crashes on the problem page ( actually I know my own editorial pages are generally fine, so usually just try re-exporting the ad pages).

In the past I have watched my Background Tasks bar reach 95-99% again and again prior to a crash, and each time i wonder why the pdf export bar is shown as a percentage rather than a series of page numbers. A page number, or both page number and percentage would allow me to instantly determine the problem page prior to the crash. Also, why is the page number that caused the crash not displayed in the crash report? Surely Indesign records data about what it is doing at the point of the crash? i.e. Crash during pdf export: Page XX

I know these questions probably have obvious answers to the app developers and are perhaps not possible, but it seems to me from reading this and numerous other threads, that both of these ideas would save a lot of people from manually doing the detective work.

Friends I'm reading all the posts, but I have the same problem. My Indesign crashes exporting a document of 60 pages into pdf.

Can anybody help me please? The next week I have to deliver the project. Thank you!

This is the error message:

Process:               Adobe InDesign CS6 [2996]

Path:                  /Applications/Adobe InDesign CS6/Adobe InDesign CS6.app/Contents/MacOS/Adobe InDesign CS6

Identifier:            com.adobe.InDesign

Version:               8.0.0.370 (8000)

Code Type:             X86 (Native)

Parent Process:        ??? [1]

Responsible:           Adobe InDesign CS6 [2996]

User ID:               502

Date/Time:             2014-11-20 12:07:06.086 +0100

OS Version:            Mac OS X 10.10.1 (14B25)

Report Version:        11

Anonymous UUID:        1B173797-49B9-7B44-7C5E-AEF6059371E1

Sleep/Wake UUID:       D5A59AA4-AE79-4927-BEF0-BDE56A168D31

Time Awake Since Boot: 89000 seconds

Time Since Wake:       14000 seconds

Crashed Thread:        11

Exception Type:        EXC_CRASH (SIGABRT)

Exception Codes:       0x0000000000000000, 0x0000000000000000

Application Specific Information:

[2996] stack overflow

Thread 0:: Dispatch queue: com.apple.main-thread

0   libsystem_kernel.dylib         0x955cba2e mach_msg_trap + 10

1   libsystem_kernel.dylib         0x955caad0 mach_msg + 68

2   com.apple.CoreFoundation       0x927e2ae6 __CFRunLoopServiceMachPort + 214

3   com.apple.CoreFoundation       0x927e1ef9 __CFRunLoopRun + 1529

4   com.apple.CoreFoundation       0x927e1696 CFRunLoopRunSpecific + 390

5   com.apple.CoreFoundation       0x927e14fb CFRunLoopRunInMode + 123

6   com.apple.HIToolbox           0x99328178 RunCurrentEventLoopInMode + 262

7   com.apple.HIToolbox           0x99327eb1 ReceiveNextEventCommon + 494

8   com.apple.HIToolbox           0x994cd798 ReceiveNextEvent + 90

9   com.adobe.InDesign.AppFramework 0x1006eaf8 0x10060000 + 60152

10  com.adobe.InDesign.AppFramework 0x1008d327 GetPlugIn + 12007

11  com.adobe.InDesign             0x00001ec5 main + 341

12  com.adobe.InDesign             0x00001d55 start + 53

.....

I too was having a problem exporting an InDesign CS6 file to a PDF. The error message simply said, "Could not export PDF". So I tried printing to an Adobe PDF file and noticied that the exporting would hang up on page 12 of a 19-page document. Then I tried to print to PDF using a 3rd party distiller called PDF Complete (http://www.pdfcomplete.com/cms/default.aspx). This 3rd party distiller gave me the error message "There is a problem with a font file on page 12" and it produced a .txt file with the following error:

%%[ ProductName: Distiller ]%%

%%[Page: 1]%%

%%[Page: 2]%%

%%[Page: 3]%%

%%[Page: 4]%%

%%[Page: 5]%%

%%[Page: 6]%%

%%[Page: 7]%%

%%[Page: 8]%%

%%[Page: 9]%%

%%[Page: 10]%%

%%[Page: 11]%%

%%[ Error: undefined; OffendingCommand: 1.#NAN ]%%

%%[ Flushing: rest of job (to end-of-file) will be ignored ]%%

%%[ Warning: PostScript error. No PDF file produced. ] %%

I went to the "Type" menu and selected "Find Fonts" and tried to eliminate any erronenous fonts, but this did not correct the problem.

After deleting the contents of page 12 (except for what was in the master page), the file exported to a PDF perfectly with no errors.

In the end, I had re-create page 12 of my document, the page that was causing the issue, which is much better than having to re-create the entire document, which incidentally took 20 hours to create the first time.

Just had an issue where CS6 was giving error message "Failed to Export PDF File" when trying to create a pdf. After much trouibleshooting, we found the culprit to be an icon created in Illustrator and pasted (not linked) into InDesign. Just thought's I'd share in case anyone else was having similar issues and have been unable to resolve.

I'm having crashes, multiple, and can't see to get a PDF no matter what I do. Adobe Presets crash, export crashes, Printing crashes, etc.
It appears that when a "warning" windows tries to open, like when you're packaging and it says "warning, something something something is kinda wrong", it crashed.

EVERY FREAKIN TIME!

I'm on Lion, but this doesn't seem like an easy work around.

Discuss...

Just got off the phone with Adobe. Had supurb customer service by the way. Anyhow, while on the phone with them I made individual PDFs of each page, trying to see which one was causing the crash. Turned out to be on page 41 of a 46 page magazine. An ad had become corrupted. I looked in Adobe Bridge and it appears that ad was created in Quark. Go figure. Anyhow, it's all solved now. Thanks for everyone's help.