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Unexplained apparition of black redaction shapes

Forum|Forum|1 day ago
August 22, 2026
16 replies
56 views

I was working on a document in Adobe InDesign 2026, and suddenly, black boxes and other organic shapes started to appear on the screen. They seem to be embedded in the creative - meaning, they move with the screen, like a normal object would, but there's no trace of the editable object on the live page nor on the master. I can't remove it, and I don't know where it came from.

Conrad_C

Community Expert

I sometimes see those black polygons too. It seems to be a long-standing problem with how InDesign renders to the screen on macOS. Until Adobe fixes it, the workarounds all have to do with trying to reset how InDesign draws pages.

Disabling GPU acceleration can be a short-term workaround, as others have said. Other redraw workarounds such as switching in and out of Preview don’t help.

I have found that the problem isn’t permanent, so when it happens, if I want to make the problem go away and keep GPU acceleration on, that usually involves closing the document and opening it again. Sometimes the Black Shapes of Mystery are still there after I do that, so then I know I have to completely quit InDesign and open it and the document I was working on again, and usually it’s fine after that…for a while.

I haven’t identified a pattern for when it happens. It will happen one day, and then not again for a few weeks, and then I’ll see it again.

It seems related to another problem where if I change the display configuration (most commonly, reconnecting to my two-display desktop setup after using just my MacBook Pro screen alone), if an InDesign document is open, then after the display change the document window is just displayed empty (not even page borders, just solid white) and no refresh workarounds help. Again, the workaround is to quit InDesign, then restart the app and re-open the document.

I don’t think it helps to reset caches or anything like that. This seems like an issue with real-time page rendering.

I am not sure why these display issues remain unresolved for so many years.

D

defaultz5gltv4wy482Author

Participating Frequently

Also, my username is LizBullen, I don’t know why it’s not showing up.

m1b

Community Expert

Hi @defaultz5gltv4wy482, a couple of ideas:

Do they go away if you toggle View > Preview on CPU ?
Try copying everything on the affected page, then paste into a new document. Did the artifacts follow? If yes, then do that same again with only *half* the items. Then try the other half if no. You’ll at least work out which item is odd.