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

[Gavin at MRP]

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.

[Mike Witherell]

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]

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.