Issues with InDesign: Greyed-Out Pages and Auto-Resizing When Switching Displays

Forum|Forum|1 year ago
October 26, 2024
3 replies
1107 views

Both of these problems occur in my workflow because of switching between MacBook Pro and an external display (HDMI). Which happens multiple times per day. That makes this really uncomfortable:

1) Invisible Pages and Objects/Designs. Every time I switch beween Mac an external display the whole pasteboard turns grey. Only solution that I found for this is restarting Indesign.

2) Auto-Resizing of the application. Indesign jumps back to some earlier application size. Maybe from the Macbook or the big display. I don’t really know what’s happening. Happens especially when switching to presentation mode and back (Shift-W).

Short screen recording attached

Is this community the right place to let adobe know about these problems? Or does anybody have the same problems? Or a solution?

Thank you.

Screen_Recording_2024-10-26_at_10-07-10.zip

Bug

D

DavidRulz

Inspiring

This issue is somehow resolution related. I changed my display resolutions between my extended monitor (an Asus ProArt which has a resolution of 3840x2160 and defaults to 1920x1080).
And the MacBook Pro is set as the extended display and it is set to the default 1728x1117

I enabled "Show all resolutions" which might be necessary to select the apropriate resolution combo that may work with your specific setup.

Hopefully this isn't just a temporary fluke, but I've had multiple documents open and switched displays, using the external display as my primary and unplugging and it still works. Hopefully this apparent resolution incompatibility is the issue and helps somebody else.

otterstyle

Participating Frequently

I have the exact same issue with different MacBooks on different screens. It seems to be a very common problem (which Adobe, as usual, doesn’t care to fix). I know at least three people with the same issue. Deactivating the GPU, as mentioned, helps. However, you don’t have to deactivate it in your preferences. You can leave it activated and press Shift + E to switch between CPU and GPU Preview. This is my workaround until I restart InDesign.

The bug seems to be triggered when InDesign is open while connecting a second screen. Restarting InDesign with the screen already connected should fix it, but sometimes you don’t want to restart, so Shift + E is a helpful alternative.

Wouldn’t hope for a fix anytime soon. As usual, you just need to find workarounds to deal with Adobe’s broken software.

E

Eugene Tyson

Community Expert

The GPU Performance setting in InDesign is designed to optimise screen rendering, particularly for high-resolution or Retina displays. However, if your monitor uses an unsupported resolution or there are compatibility issues, the feature may not function correctly. In such cases, turning it off is often the best workaround to prevent display issues.

It's worth noting that Adobe is aware of this, which is why the option to disable GPU Performance exists. On Windows, this feature is greyed out by default, likely due to differences in how the platform handles GPU rendering.

The root cause could lie with the monitor, Apple's support for third-party monitors, or even with Adobe itself.

In any case, because the feature isn't fully supported in all configurations, the option to disable it is provided to ensure compatibility across a wider range of setups.

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Eugene Tyson

Community Expert

This is user to user platform - so users try help each other resolve their issues.

Try turning off the GPU Performance in the InDesign settings.

It might be that the 2nd monitor has issues in regards to GPU performance. I have this turned off in InDesign (have no idea what use it is) - it might not be capable of displaying the resolution required or something like that - no idea really.

What is the 2nd monitor you have?

I don't know if it's an Adobe issue or a Mac issue - or a cable issue - or a Monitor issue - or something else - perhaps resolution issue (of switching monitor resolutions)

I work on a Mac with a monitor connected via HDMI and don't experience this - so I can't rule out that it's directly a bug just yet.

There's a few threads about similar issues

https://community.adobe.com/t5/indesign-discussions/indesign-display-issues-with-external-monitor-dell-u4021qw-and-macbook-m1-max/td-p/12584352

https://community.adobe.com/t5/indesign-discussions/dual-monitor-issues-w-indesign/m-p/12085236