InDesign CS5 will not "save" or "save as"

[darius93]

Hey.

So I've been working on this document for about an hour and I went in to save it for the first time, which I know is bad, the "save" and "save as" buttons are grayed out. I've tried looking through the preferences, and I've tried looking through the different modes I'm in but nothing is working.

The file is a web document and there is nothing special in it, just rectangles and a picture placed from a photoshop file, which I suspect is the problem. But InDesign lets me create a new file, any type, but once I do anything to the new file I again cannot save it at all. Some other glitches have been going on too, such as the hot corners have been buggy (not working sometimes) and when I drag a rectangle, the whole document fills with the color of the rectangle, making it impossible for me to get the positioning I want.

Lastly, I've been reading about clearing the preferences' cache and other things similar to that but I don't know if that is the solution. Also I would like to try to not restart InDesign before trying other ways because I've bee working on this file for a while. But if that's the only way I can get it to be working again, I do it.

Thanks.

[emmahunter2010]

Hi Peter,

I managed to use the shortcut to replace my preferences and I don't want to talk too soon but it appears to have worked.   I'll open the file again tomorrow to double check.

thank you!

hope adobe give you something to say thanks! you seem to be helping a huge no. of people.

thanks again.

Emma.

[Peter Spier]

I do it because people like you say thanks.

Thanks.

[MatthewLaun]

First,

Thanks to Peter for bringing this to my attention.

I'd like to help, but this is going to be a tough one, and will probably require someone who is consistently experiencing the problem working with me through a process of eliminating variables (such as use of a font management system) then workfing for a while to see if the change prevents the problem from occuring. If someone is prepared to work with me on such a project, please contact me through a private message.

Sincerely,

Matthew

[Peter Spier]

Thank you, Matthew.

For those who are following this and may not be aware of who he is, Matthew is a member of the InDesign team. It was through his similar efforts that problems with PDF export hangs were identified and resolved. I hope at least one of you, Lonzo in particular since he seems to be having repeatable problems, is able to work with Matthew.

[Lonzo2204]

I'll be glad to help beginning next week. Matthew said to reply through a private message. Don't know how to send a private message.

[MatthewLaun]

Click on my name to view my profile, then click on Send Private Message from the right navbar.

Cheers!

Matthew

[MatthewLaun]

For anyone who is experiencing this issue with regular frequency, I'd like to ask if you can try the following.

Disable Preflight:

1) Choose Window > Output > Preflight.

2) Uncheck the On checkbox.

3) Work in this application state for as long as you can manage, and see if the issue returns.

Please alert us to your results.

Sincerely,

Matthew

[MatthewLaun]

All,

Here's what I have so far in my attempts to identify a root cause for this so we can work towards a resolution.

Working with a particular user directly, I sent a script written to save any open files and had them try to run it while in this state. The script returned the error, "Cannot save document because there are open transactions on the database." The database is referring to the InDesign document, and the open transaction is some change that was started, but for some reason failed to complete. So the application is still waiting for something to complete before it will alow certain actions, like a save command.

That still leaves me looking for the trigger that starts, but fails to complete some change to the document, which is a needle in a haystack still.

Things that I'd like to learn more include:

* What is your OS version? So far, all seem to be 10.6.6, no Windows users. If anyone is on something other than 10.6.6, please let me know.

* Status of background tasks. When you're in this state, check Window > Utilities > Background Tasks and see if anything is reported there (I'm doubtful).

* Disablement of Preflight (as mentioned in my previous post).

* Any other side effects that you notice while in this state, such as the X,Y position behavior noted above.

* When in this state, can you create a new document and save it.

Thanks for your help, and patience.

Matthew

[Peter Spier]

The x/y thing sounds a bit like a Live Screen Drawing problem. Is your preference for that set to imediate, or something else?

[Lonzo2204]

Peter,

Mine was set to "immediate."

Let me know what you recommend and i'll change.

Nancy

[MatthewLaun]

All,

"Immediate" is the default, so it would be interesting to see if changing this to "Never" would prevent the issue from returning. If someone can try that as a test, and let us know if you reach some period of time that leads you to suspect it makes a difference, that would be appreciated.

Change this by choosing InDesign > Preferences > Interface > Options > Live Screen Drawing = Never.

Matthew

[Lonzo2204]

I've set preference to "Never" and also disabled preflight.

I'll spend a lot of time this weekend seeing if I can trigger the issue.

I'll keep you posted.

[FordRack]

This is happening to me as well.

Turning off Preflight has helped so far - though I've done 15 minutes of testing.

Thanks to Matthew for jumping on this and keeping the forum updated.

Thanks to Peter for alerting Matthew.

Here's hoping for a speedy solution. These things shake ones confidence in the 'Suite. I, for one, never want that to happen...

[Peter Spier]

If it's all right with Matthew, I think it would be helpful, too, if someone were to try "Delayed" for Live Screen Drawing. That's the behavior you're used to from CS4 where holding for a moment gives you the live preview, and it seems to alleviate a lot of screen drawing issues like jerkiness and unpredictable movement for many users, like me.

[Guest]

By the number of posts on this problem, I would think Adobe would offer a fix. I am currently putting together 60 years worth of my poetry and I have this problem constantly! My document is in different InD sections and when I open one file, I can save changes for a while before the save gets grayed out. Sometimes the Save As is still available; sometimes not. If it is, I merlely save as with the same file name! If it ain't I just quit InD and tell it not to bother to save changes. But before I do that I print out the page I've made changes on so I know what changes I made. When I reopen the section file, here we go again. I can save for a while until I have to go through the whole printing, quitting, reopening again! I am so disgusted. I used Pagemaker since it came on 12 FLOPPY DISKS and never had a problem of any kind. I work on a MacbookPro and, in addition to the above problem, I find InDesign too touchy with teh mouse pad. If I just happen to touch it in the wrong place, it will send the spread or page right, left, up or down or even take me to another page! I'm not about to start exporting and changing anything; I will continue to cope as best I can and cuss out Adobe. BTW, I use Safari to browse the Net. Saw one post that said the browser used may affect performance of InDesign. True?

[Peter Spier]

Did you notice the posts from Matthew Laun?  He IS working on a fix, but until the problem can be identified and and reliably and consistently reproduced it's not possible to issue a patch.

In the meantime, have you exported all of these files to .idml and started working with those? How about any of the other suggestions earlier in the thread? If your files are Pagemaker files converted to ID, it's particularly important that you run them through .idml to clean them up.

[MatthewLaun]

Promising development. I provided a debug build to one of the users encountering this issue and it has reported back an assert that I believe is associated with the root cause of the failure. The assert includes the name of the C++ file and line of code, so I'm hopeful an engineer examining that code can see a defect, or hypothesize one.

The code in question has to do with tabbed document windows, so one thing that I'd like to suggest is that users disable the default option of using tabbed documents, and work with floating document windows, and see if you can reproduce the failure in that state. To disable this option:

InDesign > Preferences > Interface > disable "Open Documents as Tabs".

Sorry this has taken so long to get some progress on, but many thanks to Nancy at Sir Speedy for doing some great detective work!!

Sincerely,

Matthew

[mezmiranda11]

Hi Matthew

I too have had the same "unable to save or save as" problem. Ive read this whole forum, and turned off both the open windows as tab preference, and the preflight preference, it worked for a while, but now Im still having the same problem. I dont use font management software, Im on a mac osx 10.5.8.

Have there been any further developments with this bug?

Thanks,

Miranda

[AnaNJune]

Hi everyone,

Matthew, I'm so grateful you all are working on a fix. I ran into this problem today and the export remedy worked (whew!!). However, when I restared InDesign and tried to make a new document, all of my preferences and document presets disappeared and I'm back to square one (this after defining presets for all the ad sizes I work with for the publication I design). This is a huge bummer...and I wonder if it will happen again if I have to go through the export to IDML again?? Anyone else had this happen? Are they connected?

If this has already been addressed, my apologies. I scanned both thread pages and didn't see it but I'm a wee bit frantic about this at the moment.

Thanks!!

[Peter Spier]

Loss of presets would be associted with repalcing the preferences, but not, as far as I know, with exporting a file. You might want to look at Replace Your Preferences for some advice on what and how you should back up to recover these types of things if you need to do it in the future.

[AnaNJune]

Thank you, Peter. Yeah, I hadn't done anything to my preferences....they just vanished. Will check out that link!

[anthonypowis]

Hi all,

I've been having this problem too. I think it first occurred after dragging a PDF into InDesign from a CAD program.

[Guest]

I was never doing anything but entering new text or editing text. It seems

to have a mind of its own and I must quit the program and then restart it.

Message box says cannot save changes. When I reopen the file, most times the

changes are not there, but for some unknown reason, sometimes they are! It's

a pain in the neck.

[scottgriz]

I came upon this thread because we have a designer in our studio who keep encountering this problem on her machine. She is running an iMac C2D 2.0Ghz with 4GB of ram. Adobe CS5 Design Standard suite. InDesign has been updated to 7.0.4 and her system is 10.6.7.

We are using only FontBook for font management.

I see that the thread has been marked as answered. But it appears there still is no official answer. Can we assume that this means a patch for IDCS5 is coming to address this?

Matthew, if you are still looking for someone to provide data from this particular issue, please let me know and I will be happy to provide what I can if the problem occurs again.

The one oddity that she mentioned was that when the problem happened, and she was working on a document, when she tried to drag a text field, her pointer would turn into a symbol of a circle with a line through it.

Are you still recommending we turn off tabbed windows and preflight?

Thanks,

Scott

[MatthewLaun]

I think we have enough data at this point. The challenge I'm facing is getting the shared technology team to apply resources to investigate this while they are also focusing on implementing change for the next major release. I'm afraid attempts to identify the actual factor that introduces this with regards to user steps or settings, have failed, so I have no suggestions right now on how to avoid this. Hopefully the engineering investigation into the debugging data I got from one of the customers on this thread, will guide us to a solution, as well as temporary ways to avoid it.

Sincerely,

Matthew