Question

What do I do if InDesign just hangs constantly

Forum|Forum|4 months ago
January 20, 2026
4 replies
156 views

What do I do if InDesign hangs constantly on a certain document, whenever I touch anything in it? Just spinning wheel forever (mac, latest everything)?

Bug

Mike Witherell

Community Expert

Here is a complete compendium:

https://community.adobe.com/t5/indesign-discussions/reset-indesign-preferences-and-other-troubleshooting/td-p/11990234

Mike Witherell

theredw2Author

Thanks for all the suggestions. It gave me some ideas, but I didn't have to do any of the above.

As I said, the stack dump indicated it's a clear rendering BUG (and it kind of sucks there's no way to actually report bugs to adobe so they can be FIXED)...anyway...

I just put some hard column breaks in the doc until the crashing stopped, finished my editing, and then removed the hard column breaks. It's all working fine (at the moment) again, no need to disable/blame plugins, cache, fonts, etc... I hope i just don't hit the bug again (on this or any other doc) as there seems to be no way to actually deal with bugs like this.

Perhaps Adobe could take some of the billions in profit and actually figure out how to solve real program issues experienced by users...a dev loading the doc in debug mode (internal) would have found the issue in a few minutes...AND fixed it so other customers don't hit it in the future.

rob day

Community Expert

BUG (and it kind of sucks there's no way to actually report bugs to adobe so they can be FIXED)...anyway...

You can report bugs here:

https://indesign.uservoice.com/forums/601180-adobe-indesign-bugs

Note that you will have to list the steps needed to reproduce the bug and show the problem isn’t caused by something specific to your setup—i.e., a corrupt document, font, plugin, etc

davecourtemanche

Inspiring

Steps I take to minimize spinning wheel:
Turn off preflight
Turn off font activation
Set view settings to Typical or Fast (placeholder grey boxes for images)
Also, I've found certain fonts can drag a file down (oddly) and using a lot of split / span paragraph styles can drag a doc.

Hope one of these may help.

rob day

Community Expert

Hi @theredw2 , Did you try deleting your Cashes file and if that's not a fix delete your Prefereces? Are you running any third party plugins or startup scripts?

leo.r

Community Expert

for starters, can you export the document to IDML? if so, then export, then open and resave the IDML.

theredw2Author

Good idea...tried it. I was able to export to IDML, open the IDML and save as (new) INDD doc...however, it behaves exactly the same (hangs on any edit)...

theredw2Author

btw, this is not a new doc. It's one I've been working on and editing fine for nearly a year now...

also, I'm guessing Adobe doesn't actually like, you know, talk to customers who are completely stuck? 🤷‍♂

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