PDF Export Fails When Document Contains Placed InDesign Files

Question

Ever since the update in November last year we have not been able to successfully export any files that contain placed InDesign files to PDF. I placed a post in the community forums last year where multiple other people experienced the same issue but now that post is gone without being addressed so I am posting it here again.

Last year the exported PDFs resulted in low resolution images regardless of what export settings were used. Now we aren’t even able to generate a PDF with constant errors.

The reason we used placed InDesign files is so that if any changes are made to the original we’ll know because the file will show as modified. I do not want to copy and paste the InDesign file or place a separate file like a PDF or JPG as that doubles our work and doesn’t guarantee us that we will make sure all files are up-to-date.

We’re using InDesign 21.2 on a 24 inch M1 Mac - everything was working fine until the latest update and we can’t afford to revert back to the previous versions now.

I need a solution for this ASAP as it has been almost 4 months without a sloution and it is affecting our productivity.

defaultm9k39xmxlarl · Answer

My team places InDesign files into InDesign for the same reason as you, in case changes are made on the InDesign files that are linked, we can update those automatically next time we are in the file. It also saves our team hours of labor to export those linked files into PDFs.

Yesterday I was unable to export a final PDF. Pages were left blank or with gray boxes where the linked files were supposed to be. I tried resaving the file to my desktop, adjusting PDF settings, nothing worked. I finally had to export all of those linked files into PDFs and relink them, which took hours but the project was due to the printer.

After reading this post, I realized I have been experiencing some of those additional issues since last fall, where occasionally one of the linked InDesign files exports as low-res in the final PDF. I thought it was a one time glitch, but now I know it is not.

This a major workflow issue for my team as we work on 100-200 page documents with hundreds of links within them. Why has this not been addressed?

I’m using Mac Tahoe 26.3.1, InDesign 21.3

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