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InDesign 2019 v14.01 spinning beachball every few seconds

Forum|Forum|7 years ago
January 25, 2019
15 replies
15065 views

When II open a file, if it's longer (say 60 pages) it spins every few seconds, hangs, and then comes back to life. Ad infinitum.

I am posting this new topic because everything I can find points to v14.00, not v14.01, and explains this exact issue. I've uninstalled all versions of InDesign, reinstalled, systematically removed other apps (Removed all Plugins, deactivated and uninstalled Extensis Suitcase Fusion, ESET Antivirus, Dattodrive sync, etc), deactivated fonts, cleansed all my links, and on and on. The only thing that seems to help is shortening the document, like whatever is taking place is looking at my whole document. Still beachballs but only for a second, and with a single page it doesn't interrupt but still doesn't feel fast.

I also ran Apples hardware test to make sure it wasn't just a broken GPU or something and everything came back positive.

To help get the obvious stuff out of the way:

1. Turned of Save Page Preview

2. Disabled all the fun font features (live preview, preview on hover, etc)

3. turned of page panel thumbnails

4. set view display to Typical and made sure those were at a normal level

System:

iMac (Retina 5K, 27-inch, Late 2015) 32GB RAM, AMD Radeon R9 M395X 4096 MB

External 30" Dell

Logitech Craft Keyboard and Mouse

Anyone have any ideas?

This topic has been closed for replies.

Correct answer Bill Silbert

When you uninstalled and reinstalled did you do it in the following manner?:

In the app section of your Creative Cloud desktop app click on the “V” next to the app’s (InDesign) name and choose the “Uninstall” option from the pull-down menu that appears. After you’ve run the uninstall then use the Creative Cloud Cleaner Tool Use the Creative Cloud Cleaner Tool to solve installation problems . Then reinstall the program through the Desktop app. Before you reinstall, once again trash all preference files to make sure that your install is completely clean. Then launch InDesign and see if the problem persists.

K

koswalt

Participating Frequently

Hey MossArtDept,

I read all your comments and it really is disappointing that they decided to call this "solved". It's not solved and it IS an Adobe issue. I've been having this issue for the last couple weeks now on certain files and I've experienced it in the past after updating my InDesign. Luckily, I have found a solution and YES it is a fonts issue.

If you've previously packaged your fonts, make sure you have the document closed and delete the fonts folder that was created when you packaged the file. You should be able to repackage your file from there and you won't have any more issues... until the next update. I hope this works for you and others out there!!!

TL;DR
Delete the fonts folder that's created when you packaged the project.

Enchanted_difference1549

Inspiring

Hi there,

this is silly: issue is still there, untouched, even after InDesign 2020 15.1.1 installed!

Anyway, no, deleting the packaged fonts folder is not solving the problem.

Take a look at the video, maybe will be easier than reading...

Same, same, same, same behavior:

1) Spinning ball when focusing into a specific document (not all)

2) Spinning ball time proportional to doc lenght, layers and font numbers (from 2-3 sec to 40+ secs!)

3) Reducing document complexity proportionally reduces spinning ball time, but not eradicates it

4) Changing ALL fonts and styles into a single font seems to solve

5) Creating a new user on Mac and running from there opens complex document with NO spinning ball

6) Apparently not related to font managers

7) Definitely font related, a LOT of font folders (and settings folders) reading is detected by spoofing OS activity.

... I'm now living with this problem since 5-6 years... even still there after 2 Mac hardware change and clean install.

Puzzled.

Will keep investigating.

F

FlyingLlama

Participant

Hi did you have any luck with this ? We are being crippled by this at our agency. Beachballs all the time. Slowing us to turtles pace.

Ive tried everything.

Delete Preferences

Delete Caches.

Remove App

Use Creative cloud Cleaner Tool.

Reinstall App.

Remove 3rd Party Plug ins

Turn off most of the Functions in Indesign.

Setting up a new user on the Mac

Working locally / or on File Server.

My guy tells me this is an issue with indesign trying to make some sort of call back to the adobe servers to check something and potentially how it handles fonts. If I disable the Internet network – turn off WIFI, Turn off Ethernet. The problem goes away.

The Problem is specifically a Beachball for 5-20 seconds sporadically but very regularly when you do things such as. Change a font, Move a text box, Scale Type, Rotate or scale an image. You cant replicate it doing the same actions every time, but its generally when doing things like that. This happens on indesign files both Saved on our network drive, or locally on my Mac. This has been an ongoing issue since 2019 version to varying degrees.

Ive got my IT team as well as Extensis looking into it.

I was disspointed adobe tried to shrug it off and say its an OS issue.

If you have any further insights i'd love to hear it.

Cheers...Just as puzzled as you in June 2020

C

Chili0490

Participant

What I don't get is why Adobe is not fixing this issue pronto. It honestly can't be up to the users to jump through arduous hoops to make a tool we pay a lot of money for work. Honestly!!!

MossArtDeptAuthor

Participating Frequently

HI all, OP here. I was able to resolve my immediate issue.

While I will agree with the many experts on this forum that a myriad of setups could cause a beachball of death, I am confident there is a real bug with the way the latest InDesign handles fonts/refreshes/something resulting is a serious hangup.

On to my solution: Make a new user. I tested this theory when I moved to a new machine, but that was before 14.02 (14.01 had a similar bug that was squashed but still present for me). While moving everything to a new user can be painful (and sometimes require IT's help), I have had success on both 2013 Mac Pro and a 2017 iMac. Adobe has now removed the option to install older versions of InDesign (below v13.xx), but the other culprit could have been our need to have InDesign v9.3 (2014) installed as well.

I feel either the combination of having both versions of InDesign, or some corrupt cache that develops over time were possible sources for this issue.

I hope that helps someone!

Enchanted_difference1549

Inspiring

Hi,

confirm making a new user is solving - at least my version of - the spinning ball!

Now really need to deep dive and understand the real cause because it's really impossible to use ID in a new user environment.

L.

markv65614602

Participating Frequently

I've been having the same spinning beachball problem too. Productivity slows to a crawl with InDesign. Top of the line new Mac, the latest (CC 2019) InDesign as well as trying older versions. Many other people I know are having the same problem.

Jeff Witchel, ACI

Community Expert

Have you gone through and tried the two pages of answers above?

There are many things that can cause the Spinning Beachball of Death and most of them have been discussed in this thread.

markv65614602

Participating Frequently

Yes. Have also been working with Extensis support, thinking it's a font-related issue. Nothing works.

Enchanted_difference1549

Inspiring

Hi there,

I think I'm facing the very same problem, and was't able to get rid of it even doing a clean reinstall after buying a new MacBook Pro!

Recap:

- InDesign goes in ball-spinning mode every time I come back to the application from other windows (eg: going to finder or browser, then go back to InDesign)

- Spinning is proportional to document length, could be undetectable but after 50+ pages gets some seconds

- I have a 500 pages document where I'm waiting 1:40 minutes after each change of window focus!!

- It is font related for sure

- Changing all fonts to something different (eg. Times New Roman) solves the issue

- I'm using Font Explorer Pro but also tried without it, even never installing it on the new machine, no change

- Experiencing it on High Sierra on MacBook Pro 2012 and then on Mojave on the very new MacBook Pro 2018 with no time machine restore but a clean install from zero. No preferences, settings, plugins, font manager were imported. Just plain InDesign freshly downloaded from CC app

- The only thing that stays the same is my Fonts collection. I guess there's something InDesign is checking about fonts everytime you focus back to the app, like font changes, font un/installations or stuff like that. Seems this "check" is done on each text frame that's why the waiting time it's proportional to doc length

- Of course tried all the most common "customer care copy/paste solutions", please refrain from posting "reset preferences" again, thanks..

- Of course, the very same document package including fonts, sent to colleagues with the same Mac & InDesign are working fine, AND they work fine on a PC.

NO SOLUTION at the moment.

Totally stuck.

Adobe InDesign developers are in touch, send them docs and movies but cannot replicate it.

Help.

I

ideasmithlfs

Participating Frequently

I get this too. I'll be working along just fine in Indesign, many different documents and then all of a sudden spinning beachball with every text change and then the delay gets longer and longer.

I fix this by:

1) Restarting my mac. Occasionally the mac won't restart because of the Indesign boggle (I think) and I have to hard restart to get things going again.

2) Clear the font cache. I'm using Suitcase Fusion (Version 20.0.4 (8312)). This forces another restart.

Usually after this point when I go back into Indesign and the same documents, everything is working speedy again.

The other thing that I've noticed is that if you change your workspace settings, Indesign will behave better. So I just switch among a few of the the preset workspaces and the beachball will go away for a while.

I also sometimes reset all of Indesign's preferences too.

I know this is not precise, but maybe it will help.

There is definitely something wrong and it appears to be font related. Very frustrating and time consuming, but now when the beachball starts, I don't even try to live with it, I restart my mac with steps above so I can get back to work.

JThoeming

Inspiring

This beachball behavior had a colleague in a partner agency. It turned out that a connection to a NAS (Drobo) InDesign completely slowed down, why has not been found out until today. But when the Drobo was disconnected from the computer, InDesign ran as it should.

Cheers,

Joerg

J

jkinsman

Inspiring

I am experiencing similar issues. My specs

OS X El Cap

Mac Book pro 2.8 GHZ

22GB RAM

1TB SSD HD

InDesign 2015.3

Just started a couple of weeks ago on documents that I have been working in for a couple of years now. Tried IDML save and then back to INDD and it still occurred.

No plugins or font activation.

Using Lintotype FonExplorer X 1.2.3

Srishti Bali

Community Manager

Hi there,

Thanks for reaching out. As per your query, InDesign is laggy/ freezing while working on a couple of old documents. I understand how frustrating it could be. Let me help you with this.

Before starting any troubleshooting, I would suggest if you can create a local backup of these files and let us know the approximate file size of these documents.
If your files are saved on one of these locations (Network Drive/ System HDD/ Shared Folder on System /External HDD), then save them to Desktop and then try to open it.
After creating the backup, open a file in InDesign and move pages to a new document and let us know if that helps. If it doesn't allow or hangs while moving the pages, try moving the pages in small parts. For example, Move the first 10-20 pages then move the next portion.
If nothing works, try resetting preferences for InDesign: Set preferences in Adobe InDesign

Please note that resetting preferences will remove all the custom settings and InDesign will launch with default settings. You can also take a backup of the folders in case you want to. Location is mentioned in the article.

Regards,

Srishti

JThoeming

Inspiring

The problem, that InDesign became totally slow, was already at the introduction of the following options (Screenshot) ... allegedly that was fixed, but I have turned off the options since then and no speed issues ...

I am on macOS 10.13.6 and macOS 10.14.4

InDesign CC2018 and InDesign CC2019

Regards,

Joerg

S

Spikyjumper

Participating Frequently

Hello all... I'm having the same issues with InDesign 14.0.02. I've a 4pp document, no hi res images - just text and a few small vector logos:

Running off the local SDD on a Mid 2015 MacBook Pro 2.5GHz Intel Core i7 with 16Gb RAM.

I've copied content to a new document - not fixed
Saved to IDML and reopened and saved - not fixed
Stripped all fonts and now using Adobe fonts - not fixed
Uninstalled (including preference) and ran Creative Cloud Cleaner and re-installed - not fixed
Upgraded Mac OS from High Sierra to Mojave - not fixed
Moved document and links to HDD on a Late 2013 iMac 3.1GHz Intel Core i7 16Gb RAM running Mojave - not fixed

In fact it's like a lame donkey on the iMac! Can anyone help please?!?!!? I'm down to half speed on delivering client projects!!!

S

Spikyjumper

Participating Frequently

Just rolled back to InDesign 14, still the same... beachballing every few seconds!!!

BobLevine

Community Expert

Any third party plugins?

S

stepanl93119431

Participant

That's not useful, there is no problem with my preferences and my version of the MacOs. The 2018 Indesign works perfect parallel. The 2019th is slow even with a 1-page text file.

MossArtDeptAuthor

Participating Frequently

As an update, after pulling my hair and systematically working through each setting, image, text frame etc. I have resolved it is a FONT issue.

HOWEVER it is not yet definable. I use 5 fonts in the document, and the same 5 fonts are just fine under CC 2013/v9.3. If I remove ALL but one of the fonts, no matter which ones, the document works correctly. I have replace all fonts with each of the ones I'm using (I was suspect it was one of the fonts causing the slowdown) but every single one is fine if I only use one.

This isn't helpful but someone out there might just need to clean up their fonts.

I also can confirm it's not a nested or GREP style. SOMETHING about how 2019 handles multiple fonts in the document is causing major hangs and it likely an unknown bug.

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