Error mesage: You cannot reverse this change with the Edit > Undo command

[sissel_laboremus]

Hi

I'm working on a very complex book with 1500 pages, hundreds of pictures and 10 000 index-markers. Every change I do in a Index-marker (Topic Options) takes forever (approx 5 minutes after clicking OK).

After I update my Index I get the error “You cannot reverse this change with the Edit > Undo command. Do you want to continue anyway” for every little change I make. Then after a little while InDesign usually crashes and I have to set up all my preferences. Then after updating the Index the error and crash comes back.

I’m running InDesign CC v14.01 and macOS Mojave (10.14.3)

MacBook Pro Retina, 13 inch, Late 2013)

2,8 GHz Intel Core i7

16 GB Ram 1600 MHz DDR3

Additional info on the files:

Auto numbered subtitles

Some Paragraphstyles uses Paragraph Border

Anchored Margins

Conditional Text

1 TOC

No Crossreferences, Footnotes/Endnotes or Hyperlinks.

I have tried to reset the InDesign’s preferences, saved all the book documents to idml, and made sure the documents are fine otherwise.

Does anyone know how to fix this and get rid of this error-message?

[BobLevine]

You say book, but do you mean an InDesign book or an InDesign document?

If it’s one document this doesn’t surprise me at all. That machine is decent but for a job this size, 16GB is going to slow things down.

[sissel_laboremus]

The InDesign book is divided into 5 InDesign documents, but the largest one is almost 1000 pages, so maybe I should divide that one into more documents.

[BobLevine]

Not sure that would help. InDesign still needs to check all of the content.

If you can, I’d consider upgrading the RAM in that machine.

[Dave Creamer of IDEAS]

Large or complex indices is certainly one of InDesign weaker areas.

You could try:

Switching to a third-party indexing plugin, such as IndexMatic

Indiscripts :: IndexMatic 2 | Public Release and User's Guide

Or take a look at Adobe FrameMaker--less design/typographic options, but better at long documents including complex indices.