Buttons - How do you edit or change actions?

[PeterD-NJ]

Is there any way to edit the action of a button after it's been created?

And on a related note, I added four simple buttons on the master pages (previous page, next page, previously viewed, next viewed) and the document ballooned up to over 40MB, where it had been in the 19 MB range. It also takes about 15 minutes to create a PDF. The graphical elements for the buttons are a tiny--couple of hundred kb at most. How are these actions causing the file to inflate so big?

[Michael Bullo]

How are you adding actions to the buttons? Can you not just use the same method/panel to edit the actions?

I agree that your InDesign document appears to be ballooning at a crazy rate. A good general trick for file sizes that keep increasing is to occasionally do a “Save As”, not “Save”, directly over the top of the original file.

[PeterD-NJ]

The button panel vanished and I couldn't figure out where it went. I did finally locate it, so that part is good. As for the second issue, I tried that trick without success. Something about adding these four buttons on over 190 pages is bogging things down and bloating them up. Waaaay up.

[Michael Bullo]

Is it the size of the InDesign file or the PDF that is oddly bloated? Or both?

[PeterD-NJ]

The InDesign file got bloated a few years ago (200 pages of vector illustrations, a couple of smallish jpegs, and  thousands upon thousands of annotations (sometimes 100 on a single page), over 1000 hyperlinks. But until today, the Interactive PDF was always a tad under 20 MB, now it's more than double that. The print PDF, at 600dpi and crop marks, used to be about 70 Mb and is over 200 now. Saving to IDML is my next step, but that's an overnight process.

Also, the time to create an interactive PDF used to be about 3-5 minutes, now it's over 10. To create a print quality PDF is about 20 minutes on an i7 with 96 GB of RAM. The file size at the moment is 570 Mb. Saving over or as a new file drops it to 310 MB but it goes right back up as soon as I open it.

[Michael Bullo]

Those save times are insane. Any chance you do this on another computer?

Hopefully someone has some good technical solutions for you. Best of luck mate.

[BobLevine]

What version of InDesign? What operating system? Nothing here sounds normal to me.

[PeterD-NJ]

Windows 11 Pro, and Indesign 19.2 (I'm meticulous about keeping the system and software updated). I mis-spoke earlier about the processor; It's an AMD Ryzen 7 5800X (8-core), 96 GB of DDR4 RAM, 4TB of m.2 SSD storage, and a 2GB GeForce GTX 1660 graphics card (some issues with this; on zoom the baseline graphics files disappear so I have to change zoom levels).

I agree, this type of behaviour is not what I expect from a pretty high-end system, but in fairness the file I'm working with is atypical for InDesign. Probably 10,000 or 15,000 text boxes, extensive use of colour, gigantic vector images scaled way down on most pages, over 1,000 hyperlinks, and probably a host of other things that folks would rarely encounter in a typical InDesign file.

[Michael Bullo]

Are you familiar with Books in InDesign and how they can be created from multiple InDesign documents?

[PeterD-NJ]

No I'm not. Would that offer any practical advantages?

[Michael Bullo]

I’m thinking of ways to potentially prevent InDesign exploding your computer. You could break your document into multiple smaller documents which are then combined into a single final document using the Book capabilities of InDesign. The beauty with this method is that you can work on those individual documents, individually, without needing everything open at once. You can still easily do things like update Paragraph Styles and Parent (Master) Pages across all of the documents.