Background PDF export Help

[Guest]

I recently installed InDesign CS5 on my 27" iMac i5 and I'm having a problem with exporting files to PDF in the background.  I know that in CS5, pdf export is now done in the background.  Not all the time, but on many occasions when I export to PDF in the background the process freezes.  I check the background tasks manager and the process is stalled, it just sits there with 0% progress and actually freezes all background exporting functions to the point where  when I want to close the document I get an error that says" background tasks in progress can not close document".  Then I have to force quit ID to get rid of the error.  Any help?

[Peter Spier]

Copy and paste the code into a plain text editor. TextEdit is fine. Save as plain text, but add the .jsx extension. I believe sombody already pointed to a link telling you where to put it once it's saved.

[Eugene Tyson]

Place it in NotePad or similar (not Word or any program that assigns styles) use a basic text editor.

File>Save "<insertname>.jsx"

[Jongware]

In case of doubt use Adobe's own ESTK editor. It gets installed with InDesign so everyone has one.

[c kim]

OMG... IT WORKS!

I even tested it while I had the InDesign doucment "exporting" in the background... ran the script, and the PDF file was generated while the background exporting was still "Thinkin' about it!" Unfortunately, I still had to "force quit" out of the document because it would have been still "thinking" until next Tuesday.

Thanks for the "workaround."

[c kim]

OMG... IT WORKS!

I even tested it while I had the  InDesign doucment "exporting" in the background... ran the script, and  the PDF file was generated while the background exporting was still  "Thinkin' about it!" Unfortunately, I still had to "force quit" out of  the document because it would have been still "thinking" until next  Tuesday.

Thanks for the "workaround."

[Eugene Tyson]

Ah, I'd gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today (J Wellington Wimpy)

I hope there's an update for InDesign on the way - I'm getting nervous of all these reports of things going wrong in CS5?

[c kim]

... I agree

Thanks,

Brutus

[markatwrk]

Script works here too!

10.6.5

CS5

Indesign 7.0

(Before latest Adobe update all was fine... thank you Adobe, thank you.)

[BobLevine]

Here's another suggestion that just popped into my head and if it's been suggested already, my apologies.

Create a new book and add your document to that. Export the PDF from the book panel.

Bob

[MatthewLaun]

All,

With the help of one of the forum members, Steve, I was able to reproduce the issue and now have this being investigated by the InDesign development team. Once their investigation is done, we'll have an idea of how to address it. Thank you for your patience in the meantime. If you want to query on the status of the investigation, use the reference #2670994.

Many thanks to Steve!

Sincerely,

Matthew

[Peter Spier]

Good news!

[c kim]

That really is good news!

[designerBeans]

Thanks for staying on top of this. You're helping to restore my faith in Adobe

[Daniel Cilia]

Thanks Matthew. I cannot understand why people have to complain so much with a fault in an excellent program like InDesign. All programs fail somewhere. Done by humans who end up doing mistakes even if they do not intend to do so. With such a complicated program and with so many users with so many different computers and setups something is bound to slip, that is why Adobe provide free continuos updates after all!

[Thomas Dearie]

Yes - adding the document to a book, closing the book and exporting from the Book Options menu worked for us. Looks like background exporting was crashing us, though we can't be sure.

Thanks for your help Bob and Matthew!

But we shouldn't be too critical of people who come here and make complaints – often these complaints are the first steps to Adobe recognizing a problem and rectifying it, much to the benefit of all of us.

Yes, the language gets a bit shrill sometimes. But, by the time people come here to complain, they've often already been through a lot of stress that's costing them a lot of money that should be going to their mortgage (and it could happen to all of us).

Many users called tech support with this bug and were asked to pay a support call fee, which those users found objectionable. It's a longstanding point of disgruntlement in the professional community. (You can decide for yourself whether they're justified in that objection.)

In our case here at the college and in my company, our tech problems are usually very time sensitive and serious enough to baffle even the most knowledgable users here (but, in this case not Bob!).  So it's very helpful to be able to communicate this to Adobe development personnel and get some info on the likelihood of a quick workaround. It lets us make critical business decisions that have a big impact on our livelihood.

The fact that Matthew appeared here to work with users and ask for files to test was a big positive step and helped us keep our losses from this issue under $2000. It's still painful, but it could have been much worse (as in six-figure worse).

We'd love to see more of this and perhaps a standardized way of getting that kind of interaction rolling in a timely fashion.

Best of luck to all of you wrestling with this - hope this workaround solves it for you.

Cheers

Tom

[Thomas Dearie]

Ooops, that's:

... adding the document to a book, closing the document and exporting from the Book Options menu worked for us...

Couldn't really close the book and make it work, could I?

[MatthewLaun]

Everyone having troubles exporting PDFs in the background,

Can  you try a test to confirm our findings? Take a document that you know is  failing in the background, confirm it still fails (force quit InDesign  to get back to a working state 😞 Now disable Preflight and try it  again?

Note that the current theory is that a component  is unexpectedly hanging on to some memory it shouldn't be, so the size  of the document is not the issue, simply the document and application  circumstances to cause that component to be working while you're trying  to export to PDF.

Thanks for any feedback you can offer, and for your patience while we try to address this.

Matthew

[c kim]

I think this was discussed in an earlier forum, but here's something that I found out... Since I upgraded to CS5, most of the older docuents that were originally created in CS3 (and subsequently re-saved as a CS5 document) are the ones that are giving me the problems. New documents that are created in CS5 seem to work fine... Your thoughts.

[Thomas Dearie]

c kim wrote:

I think this was discussed in an earlier forum, but here's something that I found out... Since I upgraded to CS5, most of the older docuents that were originally created in CS3 (and subsequently re-saved as a CS5 document) are the ones that are giving me the problems. New documents that are created in CS5 seem to work fine... Your thoughts.

Yes, definitely we are primarily seeing this problem in CS4 legacy files, not files created in CS5, though we're just rolling out our testing of CS5, so it's early yet.

[Thomas Dearie]

Hi Matthew.

Ran the test you suggested and the document still crashes when Preflight is turned off through the preflight options panel.

Let me know if there's anything else I can test.

Tom

[MatthewLaun]

Thomas,

Thanks for the test. Unfortunately, there is one more step that needs to be added to make it a valid test for our hypothesis. Do the steps in this order:
1) Disable Preflight

2) Close all documents

3) Open the suspect document

4) Export to PDF

The object holding on to the PSLibrary lock won't get destroyed until the document is closed, so that step 2 is critical. Could you please try again and let me know the results? It's possible that in your case there is some other action that the PSLibrary is doing unrelated to preflight, which could explain a failure even with these steps. If it fails with these steps, I'd very much like to get the file for additional data to feed into our investigation. It would ensure we have a comprehensive solution. If you can minimze the document and still reproduce the failure, then you can make the package upload/download faster. Post on Acrobat.com, or email me at mlaun at adobe dot com for FTP instructions.

Sincerely,

Matthew

[sboerner2]

Matthew --

I was able to reproduce this with the test document that I sent to you earlier. However, I had to change the order of the steps slightly:

1) Close the document

2) Disable preflight

3) Reopen the document

4) Export

Is preflight a document preference? Turning it off it before you close the document disables it for the remainder of the session with that document. But when the document is closed, preflight is enabled again in the app and stays enabled when the document is reopened. Closing the document, then disabling preflight, keeps it disabled when you reopen the document.

Just turning off preflight and keeping the document open did not seem to fix the problem. (As you said.) The document has to be opened with preflight disabled.

Anyway, once preflight was turned off the export worked perfectly -- I could watch the file being exported in the background tasks window. Sounds like you may be on to something.

Fyi I ran this test on two machines and it worked on both.

Steve

[Thomas Dearie]

Hi Matthew

Yes, I did the following and repeated to be sure:

1. Disabled Preflight and Preflight for All Docs.

2. Quit InDesign

3. Reopened and confirmed Preflight was off.

4. Opened problem doc and exported to PDF.

InDesign crashed after I left the PDF options window.

I can send you the document as a download link from our ftp page.

What do you need:

1. Document?

2. Linked files?

3. Fonts? (I suspect you have those already, being at Adobe.)

Let me know and I'll prep the file.

Cheers

Tom

Message was edited by: Thomas Dearie

[MatthewLaun]

Thomas,

If you are seeing InDesign crash, not just the background export hang and never complete, then you are experiencing something completely unrelated and would be better off isolating the root cause using the steps in this document:

http://go.adobe.com/kb/ts_cpsid_49998_en-us

Jump down to the section titled "Troubleshoot print/export problems at the document level."

If you find the root cause, report back and we can look into whether there is a defect, or just bad data somewhere in the document(s) that we are not doing good error handling with.

Sincerely,

Matthew

[Thomas Dearie]

Okee dokee. Will try this.

Certainly, forcing the export to the foreground is 100% effective.

Also, binary isolations show pages crashing in one combination and successful on another.

I'll take a look at the export troubleshooting. I'm rough on time now, as I have to catch up with things missed during the problems, but I'll try to squeeze some time out.

Cheers

Tom