macOS 15.2, InDesign 20.0.1 When I generate or update a TOC there is a roughly 7 in 10 chance InDesign 2025 will crash. This happens with multiple documents and has been happening consistently with every document since the release of 20.0 in October. I initially thought it was because I was using ID '25 on macOS Ventura, but it's still happening with existing and new documents since updating my Mac to Sequoia. Additionally, the same files moved to other computers (Windows 10, for example) also crash there when generating, updating TOCs. Happens whether the documents in question are standalone or booked, with or without other TOCs in same document, with and without other documents opened. No problems with ID '22, '23, or '24 on the same computer, with the same content in new documents or with the pre-existing documents that had pre-25 file versions. I had hoped that all those literally more than 100 automatic bug reports would have had Adobe fix the problem or reach out to me for info, but no. My own troubleshooting hasn't turned up the culprit, so I'm asking the community for help.

Pariah Burke

Community Expert

Answered

TOC Generation or Update Crashes InDesign

Forum|Forum|1 year ago
January 2, 2025
10 replies
2263 views

macOS 15.2, InDesign 20.0.1

When I generate or update a TOC there is a roughly 7 in 10 chance InDesign 2025 will crash. This happens with multiple documents and has been happening consistently with every document since the release of 20.0 in October.

I initially thought it was because I was using ID '25 on macOS Ventura, but it's still happening with existing and new documents since updating my Mac to Sequoia.
Additionally, the same files moved to other computers (Windows 10, for example) also crash there when generating, updating TOCs.
Happens whether the documents in question are standalone or booked, with or without other TOCs in same document, with and without other documents opened.
No problems with ID '22, '23, or '24 on the same computer, with the same content in new documents or with the pre-existing documents that had pre-25 file versions.

I had hoped that all those literally more than 100 automatic bug reports would have had Adobe fix the problem or reach out to me for info, but no. My own troubleshooting hasn't turned up the culprit, so I'm asking the community for help.

Bug

Correct answer christinah55744972

Goooooooood morning Pariah!

I woke up to good news, with the newest revised version the ToC:s now works!

I installed it and went ahead and tried it immediatly. I used a recent book containing 8 files with different "age" and number of layers etc.

I did use the tip to open all document but two (since I know these only contains from one page each and only one heading). The ToC was generated as quickly that I thought it was a trick of my imagnination!

I hope it will behave like this going forth as well and that You will have the same great experience.

Good luck with your writings and InDesign-activities.

C

christinah55744972Correct answer

Participating Frequently

Goooooooood morning Pariah!

I woke up to good news, with the newest revised version the ToC:s now works!

I installed it and went ahead and tried it immediatly. I used a recent book containing 8 files with different "age" and number of layers etc.

I did use the tip to open all document but two (since I know these only contains from one page each and only one heading). The ToC was generated as quickly that I thought it was a trick of my imagnination!

I hope it will behave like this going forth as well and that You will have the same great experience.

Good luck with your writings and InDesign-activities.

Pariah Burke

Author

Community Expert

Confirmed. The crashing no longer happens in any of the books it was previously happening, even those with multiple tables of contents.

Mike Witherell

Community Expert

Christina, that sounds like files that are both gigantic and overloaded. I hope you are throwing 64gb of RAM at them. How big are these multi-language files?

Mike Witherell

C

christinah55744972

Participating Frequently

Well, the books themselves are just 105 kB. But I suppose You meen how large the files contained?

Yes a normal "book" have a total size of 60 - 65 MB spread un-even over 10 different files, including the separate TOC-file.

On the other hand any file is rarely more than 12 pages long, most of them are about 5. One type is often between 20-30 pages, but this is on the other hand only containing three layers.

I've been trying out a lot of different trix to keep InDesign from crashing during these years, and I'm happy to see that the program is getting more and more stable. But it seems there is always a variable more to mess it up along the way.

Robert at ID-Tasker

Legend

@christinah55744972

How long do you work on your files / Book?

Days /. Months?

How often are you doing Save As with a new name?

The problem with InDesign is the fact, that if you do just Save - it preserves Undo History - which becomes unaccessible after you close your INDD file - but stays there until you do Save As - making your file bigger, slower and prone for corruption.

Then there is IDMLing - which strips file to "bare metal" - purges everything - Undo History, previews, etc.

Mike Witherell

Community Expert

I'm just throwing out a long shot here, but I recently went through deleting and decommissioning loads and loads of fonts. This put me in the position of having to re-install fonts on an as-needed basis. I made sure to hunt down old fonts, sometimes old TrueType fonts (my PS fonts have been long gone already). I got better overall performance after that.

This is a chicken-soup it-couldn't-hurt idea, of course. And I should add that it improved my slow-down issue. I was not having a ToC issue. But since you are exploring a crash related to assembling a string of text, I thought I would mention it.

That brings up another wish of mine: if we can all have a variety of try-this's and try-that's and tell them to each other, why can't a lot of this troubleshooting be put into a software app that can do things like analyze fonts, export to IDML and back, and other things like that? Why does so much troubleshooting have to be approached manually?

BTW, Pariah Burke, I always enjoy all your InDesign stuff you publish!

Mike Witherell

Robert at ID-Tasker

Legend

[...] That brings up another wish of mine: if we can all have a variety of try-this's and try-that's and tell them to each other, why can't a lot of this troubleshooting be put into a software app that can do things like analyze fonts, export to IDML and back, and other things like that? Why does so much troubleshooting have to be approached manually? [...]

By @Mike Witherell

All that can be easily done with my ID-Tasker tool. Including restarting InDesign between the steps.

E

Eugene Tyson

Community Expert

Have you tried creating a new Book file and reloading each document.

I think I had something similar a long time ago and if I remember correctly my procedure was

1. Export each file to IDML

2. Open each file in the version of InDesign used for the book file

3. Save each as a new file name

4. create a new book file

5. Load each document into the new book file

From what I remember the culprit was that the Book file was, say for example, created in InDesign 2024 but I was using InDesign 2025.

I have seen strange crashes when all the parts of all the files involved are not natively for that version of InDesign.

Especially if the Book file itself was an older/newer version of InDesign to begin with and not the same version as the InDesign files themselves.

---------------

As a last resort if it's still not working

You could try start a new document with same margins and page sizes etc.

Then move your pages to the new document from the old document.

Then try the TOC generation again.

You could try maybe the TOC document, and maybe 2 or 3 chapters to see if it improves.

All loaded into a new Book File.

Hope that helps

Pariah Burke

Author

Community Expert

Thanks, Eugene.

Alas, I tried all those, too, without success.

E

Eugene Tyson

Community Expert

Highly strange that it's not working.

Any third party plugins?

For example if you start your computer in Safe Mode and only open InDesign does it behave normally?

https://community.adobe.com/t5/indesign-discussions/advanced-troubleshooting-for-launch-issues/td-p/11394034

Pariah Burke

Author

Community Expert

It literally took me a (work) week to generate the table of contents for InDesign Masterclass: Type & Tables (and actually delayed the publication of that book) because InDesign crashed every single time, hour after hour, of trying to generate the TOC for the INDB book of 12 INDDs. If I hadn't needed to teach MathML in the book, I wouldn't have used InDesign 2025 at all, and would have reverted to '24.

For InDesign Masterclass: Text Techniques I lost almost a week with the same crashing. In the end, I built the table of contents by hand, line by line, hyperlink by hyperlink, instead of using InDesign's built-in TOC feature.

Pariah Burke

Author

Community Expert

Submitted a bug to Adobe here: https://indesign.uservoice.com/forums/601180-adobe-indesign-bugs/suggestions/49283441-toc-generation-or-update-crashes-indesign-2025

Robert at ID-Tasker

Legend

@Pariah Burke

Can you share your file? Can be on priv if you prefer - please click my nickname.

James Gifford—NitroPress

Legend

Are you doing anything complex or unusual in your TOCs — such as GREP styles, or do the target items use cross refs or variables? Or does this happen on plain-vanilla text-to-text TOC creation?

Pariah Burke

Author

Community Expert

Are you doing anything complex or unusual in your TOCs — such as GREP styles, or do the target items use cross refs or variables? Or does this happen on plain-vanilla text-to-text TOC creation?

It happens with vanilla text-to-text TOC creation.

Robert at ID-Tasker

Legend

@Pariah Burke

Have you tried IDMLing your INDD files?

Pariah Burke

Author

Community Expert

I did, yes. I also tried using '24's conversion back to '24-version INDD (which never finished).

James Gifford—NitroPress

Legend

I don't think there's any question that ID 2025 has some serious bugs, even if they seem confined to some subset of the user base — mostly Mac, but not entirely; mostly newer OS versions there. The solution seems to be roll back to 2024 until further notice.

I'm in the group (Win11) that hasn't experienced any faults, but it's been a light production schedule for a few months and I haven't done any particularly large or complex files for a bit. I may simply be dodging bullets.

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