InDesign 2022 crashing while generating Index with book documents on Windows 10

[JessFoz]

I'm trying to generate an index for a catalog with more than 350 pages. Each page is a different InDesign document, so I'm using a book index. I've tried numerous times, and in less than 5 minutes, InDesign says it has encountered an error and needs to close. I'm using version 17.4 x64.

I have trashed my preferences, and also tried to open each page after it was added to the book, which was suggested in another thread. After opening 130 or 140 pages, InDesign tells me the next page it is opening is "damaged" and wants to repair it, but it doesn't actually repair it; the page opens fine when not part of a book index. I have included a picture of the error that comes up with the damaged file. Whether I choose to repair or not, I can't open any more files, InDesign says every page after is "damaged".

My deadline is in 2 weeks, and manually indexing is out of the question.
Any ideas would be appreciated.

[James Gifford—NitroPress · Accepted solution]

350 chapters may simply be more than the book feature can handle, for one reason or another, possibly compounded by running out of memory or resources.

Create a new Book and include only half the chapters. If that works, create a Book with the other half. If that works, it's most like a resource/overrun problem.

If only one Book faults, divide the chapters in half again and see which sub-set fails. Keep at that until you have isolated one or more faulty chapters. It is usually end notes that cause this behavior (a corrupted one), but it could happen with index markers as well.

Very tedious process, I understand... but structuring a document this way means nearly all operations will be tedious.

If neither of the first two Books shows a fault, you might be able to get around the problem by consolidating the pages into chapters of 5 or 10 pages each.

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[JessFoz]

Thank you so much for your reply, James!

I did create smaller index books, and none of the individual pages were corrupted. I was able to merge 10 files at a time into a single document, and create an index book with just 30 some documents. The index was able to generate without problem after that.
I create this index each year for our product catalog. Prior to 2022, we were using very outdated versions of InDesign and Photoshop (CS5, if you can believe it!). I was able to index 350 pages at a time using the old version, so it surprised me that the newest version ran into problems. On the other hand, it took 2 hours to generate the index using CS5, and less than 5 minutes with 2022, so there's that.
Thanks again for your help, you have saved me from the headache of trying to manually merge several smaller indexes into one (this was my backup plan, which would have been even more tedious).

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

Glad to have helped. It's what we're all here for. Well, that and the free lemonade. 🙂

ID's TOC, index, and cross references are powerful features, but they can be fussy. It's all in finding a way to make them happy.

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