Inspiring

Answered

5 to 8 minutes to spell check 50 pages is terrible

Forum|Forum|11 months ago
March 29, 2025
6 replies
3568 views

I have turned off every spell check feature except mispelled words and it still takes 5 to 8 minutes of the CSWOD to check 50 pages. This is on a Mac Studio that blows through every other ID process like butter.

Yes, I've complained before when this was a 1,200 page document, but now that document is a book of documents around 50 pages each. I'd be satified and would shut up under 2 conditions: Either tell us why this should take so long, or fix it so it doesn't.

Performance

Correct answer mazdaspeed

After working from scratch I find the issue lies in the GREP styles. Without any GREP styles, spell check finishes in a flash. With a GREP style to control runts with nobreak, such as .{6}$ , it slows spell check somewhat, but not excessively. However, I recently added two GREP queries that use a lookbehind, and hence, parentheses, and when these are in use things get much worse.

I found the following information useful in figuring this out: https://creativepro.com/speed-grep-styles/.

Since I need those lookbehind GREP styles to maintain capitalization in the underlying text, as I mimick Small Caps, I've decided to create an alternate "based-on" style that does not use any GREP styles during the spell check.

My methods may not be what others would employ, but until the spell checking, I had seen no significant degradation in performance. Even now I have 2 different documents open using similar GREP styles, including one that was held up here as a questionable example, yet the document with that bad GREP style runs spell check much faster than the one that has GREP with lookbehinds in use.

I had a bad attitude when I opened this discussion. I apologize.

mazdaspeedAuthorCorrect answer

Inspiring

After working from scratch I find the issue lies in the GREP styles. Without any GREP styles, spell check finishes in a flash. With a GREP style to control runts with nobreak, such as .{6}$ , it slows spell check somewhat, but not excessively. However, I recently added two GREP queries that use a lookbehind, and hence, parentheses, and when these are in use things get much worse.

I found the following information useful in figuring this out: https://creativepro.com/speed-grep-styles/.

Since I need those lookbehind GREP styles to maintain capitalization in the underlying text, as I mimick Small Caps, I've decided to create an alternate "based-on" style that does not use any GREP styles during the spell check.

My methods may not be what others would employ, but until the spell checking, I had seen no significant degradation in performance. Even now I have 2 different documents open using similar GREP styles, including one that was held up here as a questionable example, yet the document with that bad GREP style runs spell check much faster than the one that has GREP with lookbehinds in use.

I had a bad attitude when I opened this discussion. I apologize.

Robert at ID-Tasker

Legend

Maybe I remember things incorrectly - again - but there were a few discussions about implementation of the lookbehind in the InDesign - and it's not a good one, not always working as expected.

And, in some cases, it doesn't work at all - but can't remember the exact situation - I'll try to find post about that.

It's good to hear that you've found solution.

Robert at ID-Tasker

Legend

https://community.adobe.com/t5/indesign-discussions/negative-lookbehind-works-in-quot-grep-search-quot-but-not-in-quot-grep-style-quot/m-p/11825029

https://coppieters.nz/?p=558

Mike Witherell

Community Expert

Hi Mazdaspeed,

Can you also supply the specialized dictionary file that this Biblical text depends on? Without it, I cannot evaluate whether the spell checker is slow. Could you zip it up and upload it?

Update: I looked inside Preferences > Dictionary and can see that your example file is NOT connected to any specialty term dictionary. That alone is going to slow things down a lot. Your text is filled with Hebrew place names and people names.

So far, I find many of the paragraph styles to be overly complicated. The character styles that are meant to provide small-capitals aren't actually doing so.

I note some pitfalls:

There are 39 paragraph styles not being used along with 12 character styles not being used. If you can, unload the extra styles. Another big slow-down potentially is having many styles based on other styles. I suggest you make most of your styles based on No Paragraph Style.

Mike Witherell

Robert at ID-Tasker

Legend

@Mike Witherell

But making styles to be based one on the other - tree structure - is a correct way to do things?

Mike Witherell

Community Expert

It can be, if your skill level is very high. But in this case the complexity of the typesetting argues for a conservative approach; an approach of simplicity. As I look at this document, it looks like it has many circular connections. To untangle it, I would recommend basing each style on No Paragraph Style.

Mike Witherell

mazdaspeedAuthor

Inspiring

I don't want to drag this through the mud. I appreciate you guys helping me process this. I will likely rebuild it all from scratch since this is a document(s) that gets maintained and updated forever.

mazdaspeedAuthor

Inspiring

Fundamentally, both documents (one that is fine, the other not) use the same styling. There is GREP for no-break and for ligatures. The one that works better than the other actually has more GREP to deal with. I just removed all the GREP styles from the offending documant and now it works as expected. This still does not explain why my 250 page document finishes in less than a minute with same GREP styles in use.

But I have this objection. There is no reason (that I can imagine) for ID to have to process any GREP style or any style at all in order to spell check text. The text for spell checking should be exclusive from markup, making it a very fast matter of processing. If I am incoorect in this assumption, then I'm satisfied to be corrected.

James Gifford—NitroPress

Legend

Ah, yes, GREP styles that process all content — always potential trouble.

As for not GREPping during spell-check... I think that's a half-formed concept. Either you don't use GREP to modify the content, or you do... and if you do, you want things like spell checking to be on the 'final' form and not some interim state. Maybe for your needs it makes no difference, but I can see many cases where you would not get the same results from each approach.

I am not a real big fan of GREP for intensive text processing as you're using it. This glitch, whatever the root cause in that document, is an example of why.

(ETA: I'd use the occasional canned GREP F/R instead of a live process.)

Robert at ID-Tasker

Legend

@James Gifford—NitroPress

But GREP Styles can't change contents? Only formatting.

James Gifford—NitroPress

Legend

What exactly is taking so long? The search for each hit? Or does it take this long just to find no hits? As Mike asks, do you have any dynamic styles active?

mazdaspeedAuthor

Inspiring

When you say dynamic, what do you mean? In the two documents I refer to in the reply to Mike, they both use the same GREP styles. The 250 page document works just fine. I don't know how to look further under the hood, but I did attach one of the problem documents to my reply.

James Gifford—NitroPress

Legend

"Dynamic" means any of the on-the-fly format options, such as GREP, Line, Drop Caps etc. All of these can slow down InDesign operations if they're too broadly applied, there are too many of them or there are other document/system resource problems. Very generally speaking "this document does things very slowly" often devolves to something like a GREP style that applies to multiple items per page, or worse, to some majority of body text or the like. It takes time for ID to parse and process such things.

If this is just one doc, then the doc may be corrupted. Have you done a Save-As recently to a new name, to purge undo and image data that piles up? Have you done save as IDML, open, save as new INDD cycle to purge and rebuild other faults? Both can help with glitchy docs.

You only sort of answered the first part: I read it that each "step" in spell checking takes an extremely long time. That, to me, points to one of the above problems.

Mike Witherell

Community Expert

Tell us a bit more about your InDesign version? Your operating system and version?

Does this happen to all documents, or the one?

Have you experimented with exporting to IDML and reopening that to a fresh InDesign document?

Are you using paragraph styles to control the text?

Are you using any GREP conditional formatting to style your text?

Mike Witherell

mazdaspeedAuthor

Inspiring

This is v.19.5.1 on MacOS 15.3.1. This affects every document in this book, which was once a single document but is now 60+, from about 1 to 100 pages.

I opened a 250 page document that shares the same user dictionary but is not part of the book, and that spell check finished in less than a minute, so yes, this is underlying document specific. To test further, I deleted the story out of the 250 page document, then pasted the text and styles into what was the longer document, ran the spell check and it took 6 minutes. It takes a full minute to reach the second mispelled word on page 4. I also changed the font so I could share it here, which did not affect the time required.

indd. file is attached to this message. I tried to share the user dictionary added.txt but it gets stripped when I try to post it, so I changed the extension to .csv. There are way too many unique words to test the file without the user dictionary words.

Sorry for the bad attitude I started with. InDesign was crashing in Find/Change for much of this week. It's been frustrating.

Robert at ID-Tasker

Legend

@mazdaspeed

Can you re-upload 2nd file?

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