InDesign 19 crashes when exporting book to PDF

[Jeremy bowmangraphics]

Including hyperlinks between individual documents in the book makes it crash every time. My work has come to a complete standstill.

[Robert at ID-Tasker]

Have you tried IDMLing?

Export as IDML, open and save with A NEW NAME - of course do not overwrite original INDD file(s).

[Jeremy bowmangraphics]

Yes, I've just tried that — quite a chore, as the book contains 39 documents! This time, InDesign did not crash, and it appeared to generate the PDF. But the end result was an unreadable file:

[Robert at ID-Tasker]

Would you be able / willing / like to share your whole project on priv?

Of course I won't share it with anyone else.

[Jeremy bowmangraphics]

That's extremely decent of you, and I'll ask my employers, but this is such a big project (~900 pages, 20+ fonts for various languages from Arabic to Tibetan, etc.) that I'm reluctant to "inflict" it on you!

[Robert at ID-Tasker]

Not a problem - it would be fun. 

Another "real life" project for my tool to test on. 

You've said it was a chore to export IDMLs... Not a problem for my tool. Even free version would be quite useful. 

[Jeremy bowmangraphics]

I'm delighted to tell you that my problem is now solved! (In no small part to IDML.)

I uninstalled InDesign 19, removed all traces of id19 I could find from my machine, and reverted to InDesign 18.5. I made a new book, which wasn't a huge deal with all those new IDML files, then exported to PDF (as I have been doing at the end of most working days)… and it all looks good. Hyperlinks seem to be working.

Thanks very much for your input. I'll probably send you the whole project once it's published (which we hope will be in about a month) so you can use it as "real life" raw material.

I'll definitely have a look at ID-Tasker. But I won't go near InDesign 19 for quite a while.

All the best, and many thanks — Jeremy

[Robert at ID-Tasker]

Great you have found a workaround. 

Have you used Adobe's CC Cleaner tool? 

Thanks, that would be great if you could let me play with it.