Inspiring

Answered

BEWARE of losing custom PDF presets, if updating to Adobe InDesign 2025

Forum|Forum|1 year ago
October 18, 2024
7 replies
7578 views

First of all, if you have your Adobe set to Automatically update your apps, you’ll want to turn that off. I went into settings, because I was sure I had autoupdates off. But as it turned out (and I swear I don’t remember setting this), you can have autoupdates selectively off on an app by app basis. And for some reason mine WAS set to autoupdate InDesign.

Like others, I also lost all of my PDF presets when InDesign updated to 2025, but if you are on a Mac, you can go to the place on your drive where Adobe stores those presets, and restore that folder from Time Machine. I restored that folder to yesterday, and I got all my Adobe PDF presets back again.

User-defined PDF Presets: /Users/[username]/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Adobe PDF/Settings

I also set the Mac to only open INDD and INDT in the 2024 version of InDesign. If you let it open them in 2025, it requires a “Save As” instead of “Save” on any files you worked on, and once you save them from 2025, no one can open them in 2024, without a warning that they may end up losing some of the content of the file.

Correct answer Gavin at MRP

All reasonable; I suspect the bug will be patched quickly. You might formally report it as a bug as well, to encourage the process.

I started playing this game with blueline board and glue sticks, did a lot of things like product manuals that way, as well as marketing materials. Was lucky to get a job with one of the first shops to go PC-based and went from [a bunch of early tools no one remembers] to Ventura Publisher to some PageMaker work. Used several advanced word processors [no one has ever heard of] for long-form work. About the time Quark took over the field, I went sideways into using FrameMaker, which was and is extremely capable page layout tool comparable to ID but with less "arty" capacity and much, much better long-document features. Did several books on that, and then InDesign finally hit first maturity at CS3 and I evolved over to it. (I may be one of the very few designers to go through that era with very little time on PM and scant hours on Quark.)

These days it's entirely Word+ID, but I have a copy of FM I keep meaning to find good uses for. 🙂

Good idea @James Gifford—NitroPress — Looks like there's already a bug report on the PDF presets and it's being worked on. I've upvoted it there, as I should have done in the first place.

Here's the thread for anyone else interested:

https://indesign.uservoice.com/forums/601180-adobe-indesign-bugs/suggestions/48955421-indesign-2025-removes-all-pdf-export-setting-files

Mike Witherell

Community Expert

For macOS users who are missing joboptions after upgrading to InDesign 2025, I made a zipfile download of common joboption presets freely available at the bottom of this page:

https://trainingonsite.com/useful-resources/adobe-indesign/indesign-2025-resources.html

Directions are there as well.

Mike Witherell

Community Expert

I noticed recently that there is no one place to go get joboption presets. What if my computer mysteriously eats all the presets? Shouldn't there be a place to go download them so that one could put them back? And what if I want an archival PDF/A joboption? Where do I get such specialties? I have a mind to establish a download on my website, if I can find a comprehensive selection of the most popular ones.

Mike Witherell

P

printlives

Inspiring

Fortunately I had heard this issue, so backed up my presets, but seems I lost them on the computer I upgrated only to the final version of ID 2024, and not the computer I updated to 2025. Prestty much the same presets.

M

Martha Lynn Laskie

Participant

Theyre launching before theyre ready! V20.01 has all kinds of problems .My menus keep glitching and it crashes all the time. Also my tool bars freeze! That has never happened to me! Ive been using INDDD since the very begining ! These new floating interfaces are driving me nuts! Dont release something until you got it right! We designers dont send our clients work thats not done! Why the hell are you doing this to us?!

C

Carolyn36101089yz3q

Participant

This too happened to me - I had my Adobe apps to NOT auto-update but they did. What I can't get to work is the PPDs > ADPDF9.PPD to create custom booklet PDFs for the printer. Does anyone know if there's a newer version for InDesign 2025?

prop281218

Participating Frequently

It's deleting the PDF presets for me every time I quit and relaunch! And also deletes them for InDesign 2024 too!

So everytime I want to use IND 2025 I woudl need to reload all my presets?

Honestly, how do these releases make it past beta???

T

thiemov46411306

Participant

100% the same problem. Our production is currently stopped.

James Gifford—NitroPress

Legend

This is all normal behavior for a major update (saving only to updated/converted file format, etc.) and sometimes user presets and the like can be disconnected by a major update. All worth knowing, but not... news.

Did you have a specific reason no one should update to 2025?

Gavin at MRPAuthor

Inspiring

@James Gifford—NitroPress — do you mean other than the reasons I already stated in my original post? Yes, we all know things can possibly go awry updating an app (I might mention here that this is especially the case with Adobe updates), but since the PDF presests are shared across multiple apps, this is especially egregious. So, not only did it break InDesign 2025, it also broke previous versions, and Photoshop, and Illustrator, and Acrobat Distiller.

If you don't mind that, then by all means, update away!

James Gifford—NitroPress

Legend

I'll wait and let others test out the new version before I allow my team to update. My surprise was more centered around the loss of PDF export presets, than around the "save as". But, other department directors like myself, will want to know that. We can't afford to have one person in the department update their software and effect everyone else in the department who didn't update.

When you say FrameMaker, did you mean PageMaker? Just curious. I know that FrameMaker is also Adobe, but I find it more common for people to have moved from PageMaker to InDesign. I kind of figured you'd probably been going at the about as long as I have. Actually, I didn't jump on PageMaker OR InDesign early on. I was using QuarkXPress. I got on InDesign around the end of version 1, or the beginning of version 2.

All reasonable; I suspect the bug will be patched quickly. You might formally report it as a bug as well, to encourage the process.

I started playing this game with blueline board and glue sticks, did a lot of things like product manuals that way, as well as marketing materials. Was lucky to get a job with one of the first shops to go PC-based and went from [a bunch of early tools no one remembers] to Ventura Publisher to some PageMaker work. Used several advanced word processors [no one has ever heard of] for long-form work. About the time Quark took over the field, I went sideways into using FrameMaker, which was and is extremely capable page layout tool comparable to ID but with less "arty" capacity and much, much better long-document features. Did several books on that, and then InDesign finally hit first maturity at CS3 and I evolved over to it. (I may be one of the very few designers to go through that era with very little time on PM and scant hours on Quark.)

These days it's entirely Word+ID, but I have a copy of FM I keep meaning to find good uses for. 🙂

Sign up

To post, reply, or follow discussions, please sign in with your Adobe ID.

Sign in to Adobe Community

To post, reply, or follow discussions, please sign in with your Adobe ID.

Scanning file for viruses.

This file cannot be downloaded