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Ontos28054158gxqt
Participant
August 28, 2025
Question

Indesign Lagging nearly unusable

  • August 28, 2025
  • 2 replies
  • 162 views

I turned off preflight

I set preview to typical

Rebuilt preferences

Moved all the files to a different drive

Turned off font previews

Hid Context bar

 

62 linked ai files, has periodically lagged but now it's barely usable.

 

My system should be more than capable of handling the load, 64 gb of RAM, files are on NVME drives, GTX 4070 ti GPU

2 replies

E
Community Expert
Eugene TysonCommunity Expert
Community Expert
August 29, 2025

If a document is not behaving well then try 

File>Export 

Choose IDML

Open the IDML in InDesign
Save the file as a new InDesign file with a new name
See if the issue persists.

 

 

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You mentioned linked files - but not how many pages. 

Have you got all links on a single page - or have you got 60+ pages with images on each? 

 

Either way - I'd try duplicating the file

and in the duplicate - delete half the content, whether that's pages or images on a single page 

See if it persists

Whatever half it's failing on is where the issue is

If it fails on both - keep dividing and conquering

See what page/image the lag is happening 

 

Once you narrow it down to page(s)/image(s) then you can try to resolve the issue. 

 

 

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Another option is to create new document 

and with the old one open - select the pages and Move the pages to the new document

See if the issue persists.

 

 

O
Ontos28054158gxqtAuthor
Participant
October 12, 2025

I found a (the?) solution:

I had 8 parent pages. I remade the file to better organize it for my needs and as soon as I had the parent pages made, without anything else really done in the document, it began lagging.

It was (probably) because the parent pages referenced eachother. (E.g. Parent B was based on parent A, Parent C, was based on parent B, etc). Instead of doing this, I remade the parent pages from stratch each time, instead copying the layer elements over manually. Since then it hasn't really lagged at all (though I have a long way to go in the document).

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