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January 18, 2026
Question

unhide spread alert followed by crash in indesign

  • January 18, 2026
  • 2 replies
  • 52 views

I experienced this alert and crash of Indesign during the last days and I can't work with thos files again.

I tried to open them in another computer with another Indesign version - but faced the same result: "unhide spread" followed Indesign crash

2 replies

leo.r
Community Expert
Community Expert
January 18, 2026

 

In addition to other suggestions:

 

This seems like a known bug, here are some other threads that discuss it:

 

https://community.adobe.com/t5/indesign-discussions/indesign-quot-unhide-spreads-quot-button-causes-crash-when-opening-file/m-p/15654052#M646359

https://community.adobe.com/t5/indesign-discussions/unhide-spreads-button-crashes-on-opening-a-file/m-p/15423077#M631409

 

You may find additional suggestions here, in particular to try the recent pre-release version.

Community Expert
January 18, 2026

In some cases you can bypass it by opening with Shift to disable scripts/plugins and immediately exporting to IDML. If you can briefly access the file, deleting the affected spread or forcing an IDML round-trip sometimes removes the corruption. If it crashes instantly across machines and versions, the file is likely unrecoverable without a backup.