Anchored object frames randomly shrinking causing objects to disappear

[Jonlin Creative]

Hello all,

I'm working with a long InDesign document that contains a number of photos as anchored objects. For reasons that I've been unable to figure out, some of the anchored objects randomly disappear.

There seem to be two ways it's happening.

The first I noticed is that some of the frames are getting reduced to a virtually invisible size. In other words, the object is still there, but it's so small you can't see it.

The second problem (affecting other objects) is that the content of the frame is getting shifted outside the frame.

Again, both of these problems appear to be happening completely randomly. It may be impacted by edits to the document, but I don't see why that should matter. But needless to say, I can't have my anchored objects randomly disappearing and have to fix them over and over.

Has anyone else seen this and do you know of a solution?

[John Mensinger]

If you're running a Mac, try turning off GPU acceleration.

[Jonlin Creative]

I'm on a PC. Should I still try that? And if so, where would I find it?

[John Mensinger]

Nah sorry, no GPU acceleration in the Windows version. Disregard.

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

It's a bit sideways and may be unrelated, but define styles for your anchored items. Don't use [None] or {Basic...] styles. Leaving all your objects on these generic settings can cause bizarre problems such as you're seeing, caused by one twitch of a setting or override somewhere. Especially when the number of such objects is large.

If you have objects anchored in different ways (centered/no text wrap; left or right/text wrap, etc.) you'll need a style for each.

[Jonlin Creative]

Unfortunately, even anchored objects that have object styles applied to them are being affected. Does it matter how specific the object styles are? In other words, if I have an object style with very few attributes, does that make a difference?

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

That's the only thing I can think of, from experience. I've never seen such behavior without some cause, which is most often making a change to an item and then (deliberately or inadvertently) updating the related style. Anchored objects can do some very screwy things when that kind of global change is made.

My next step would be to see if there's some single, repeatable action that causes the changes. Does it do so on every save/close/reopen? Or only under more limited circumstances?

[John Mensinger]

Yeah, I'm with Nitro; the behaviors you describe are not typical of anything common or the result of a known bug, as far as I know.

It sounds like something I'd only call "a corruption," and I'd try exporting that document to IDML, then resetting preferences, rebooting, and opening the IDML file in hopes it will rebuild itself and shed whatever's causing the instability.

[Jonlin Creative]

That's probably worth a try. Thanks! We'll see if it works. 🙂

[Jonlin Creative]

Okay, so I was going to try to reset preferences, and the info here says to press Shift + Ctrl + Alt while InDesign is starting, then click yes when asked if I want to delete preferences. I tried that, but no dialog is coming up. Are the preferences being deleted automatically, has the recent new update changed the procedure, or am I missing something?

[Jonlin Creative]

Never mind. I just wasn't being quick enough on the draw. 🙂