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BornCreative
BornCreative
Participant
January 13, 2021
Question

Footnotes causing InDesign to crash

  • January 13, 2021
  • 4 replies
  • 1568 views

I am working on a large document (80ish pages) that has over 500 footnotes. I got to styling the 50th page and my ID now just crashes when I try to do anything. There are not a large amount of large images - just 4 on chapter page openers. Just a lot of text, tables and footnotes. I am almost positive it is because of the footnotes. Is there anyway to bring in text and style and 'hide' the footnotes? And bring them back in after it is styled? I work on this every year and this particular version of ID seems to be struggling worse than ever. Help!! I need to get this report done and I can't get past page 56.

 

I have also done all the tips to speed up ID to no avail - turn off pages preview, live drawing, preflight, typical pic view, etc.

 

THANKS!

This topic has been closed for replies.

4 replies

M
mrschey
Participant
August 31, 2023

I just had the same problem - styling footnotes made my document crash.

 

I discovered that if I expanded the width of the text box I was working on so that it went well off the pasteboard, I could style my footnotes, then put the text box back where it belonged and save my document without any problems. Who knows why this worked, but it allowed me to finish styling all the text! Cheers!

D
disigma
Participant
May 5, 2022

Hi all. I had the same problem and after thousands of restart-indesign I did this: I converted footnotes to endnotes, I placed the images and then I converted again endnotes to footnotes. It worked. And after that I can move titles to next page, smth I couldn't do before. Seems like the bug disappeared.

    keithconover
    keithconover
    Inspiring
    May 5, 2022

    Thanks for posting. I divided some of my chapters into smaller "stories" and this seemed to cure the lagginess, or maybe it was a slipstream upgrade of InDesign. If when I put them back together, I have problems, I will try your technique.

    Ashutosh_Mishra
    Ashutosh_Mishra
    Inspiring
    February 3, 2021

    Hi there,

     

    We have just released Adobe InDesign 2021 (v16.1) with multiple stability & performance fixes.

    Please update your app to the latest version & see if it helps with your concern. Let us know how it goes.

     

    Regards,

    Ashutosh

      S
      Sandro5E6F
      Participant
      December 8, 2021

      Hello Adobe,

       

      I just would like to report that we have been having the same issue described in the first comment; in fact, at my company I have to design long reports with hundrends of footnotes, and the original document is a Microsoft Word document placed in INDD. I also figured out it was the handling of the footnotes that at some point (and it seemed quite random, I have done many tests) would cause INDD to crash when doing a simple task, like eliminating a space, hitting return, or trying to format one line. Unfortunately, this issue was noticed first last year, and it is still happening with the current up-to-date 17.01 release of the software.
      So, I hope you guys can figure something for the future, considering that Microsoft is still the most used platform by all the researchers, scholars, etc., and we cannot go around it, we need to be able to handle those long documents with footnotes while we use InDesign.


      Thank you so much for your attention.

       

      Kind Regards,
      Sandro

       

       

        Mike Witherell
        Community Expert
        Mike WitherellCommunity Expert
        Community Expert
        January 13, 2021

        How much RAM, btw, and tell us about your versions and OS? Big documents need more RAM and a very well-maintained OS.

        Mike Witherell
        BornCreative
        BornCreativeAuthor
        Participant
        January 13, 2021

        Latest version of Adobe, Mojave, on a macbook pro, 16G RAM, 2.9 GHz processor. The actual file is only 11.8 MB.

        keithconover
        keithconover
        Inspiring
        January 13, 2021

        I suggest:

        Start each major section with a paragraph style that starts on a new page. Just set Keep Options > Start Paragraph > On Next Page.

        Avoid "balance columns" in your text frames unless you really need it on a specific page.

        Break your big document into separate InDesign "stories" (sections) using:

        https://github.com/Id-Extras/Break-Text-Thread and using your major section header paragraph style as the marker for where to split the text into "stories." https://creativepro.com/how-to-install-scripts-in-indesign/ 

        And if your main text frames use columns, consider having footnotes not span columns.

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