Skip to main content
Known Participant
November 1, 2012
Answered

Indesign CS6 Running Extremely Slow.

  • November 1, 2012
  • 3 replies
  • 40955 views

I designed and layout a catalog last year using InDesign CS5/Loepard. The job went smoothly. This year I have added about 25 pages and moved some items around. I am using InDesign CS6 (Cloud)/ Mountain Lion. It seems that the trouble started when I altered the page masters to rename and added a few more masters. I am at about the same amount of pages as last year and it takes about a minute just to highlight something and make a change or move something around. Sometimes it doesn't highlight at all, the little disk just spins.

Anybody have an answer for this? I have looked all over the internet and have tried all suggestions and it doesn't work. I have a deadline and this is extremely frustrating.

Anybody have an answer please email me at toddm@tallguygraphics.com

Thanks- Todd

    This topic has been closed for replies.
    Correct answer Larry G. Schneider

    Peter I used what you said for my office computer and it worked fine but I got home to my home office and there is no preferences file in the user file. Do you have any idea where it may be? Actually nothing is in the order that you have listed that I used on my work computer. Maybe this is the problem? I can't find my preferences any where. Any thoughts?


    The Users/<yourname>/Library file is a hidden file on OSX.7 and .8

    See this for instructions (says 10.7 but works for 10.8 as well)

    http://helpx.adobe.com/x-productkb/global/access-hidden-user-library-files.html

    3 replies

    Shipra8
    Participant
    October 13, 2016

    I still seem to be having this issue, someone please help, i am a student with soooo many assignments to do, and i cant do them if indesign craps itself every move i make

    Peter Spier
    Community Expert
    Community Expert
    November 1, 2012

    tallguyG wrote:

    Anybody have an answer for this? I have looked all over the internet and have tried all suggestions and it doesn't work. I have a deadline and this is extremely frustrating.

    It would be more productive if you told us what all those suggestions were that didn't work so we don't need to tell you to try them again. Have you read any of the other threads on the ID forum regarding slow performance?

    tallguyGAuthor
    Known Participant
    November 1, 2012

    Well I tried all of these:

    There are many reasons why InDesign might be running slowly, but here’s a quick rundown of things I would try in this situation, more or less in the order I would likely try them.

    • Enough memory? RAM is like air to an app like InDesign; if you don’t have enough, it will be sluggish or even die. I would never try to run InDesign on a machine with less than 2 GB of RAM, and I’m forever cursing that my laptop with 8 GB is not enough (but I’m constantly running 5 to 10 programs, often including Photoshop, Illustrator, and Word). Hard drive space can also be a cause of problems, especially if you’re working on a nearly-full drive. Common wisdom says keep 10% of your drive free. (That’s 50 GB for a 500 GB drive!) InDesign relies on your drive because when it runs out of RAM it writes to the “scratch disk” (this happens far more than you’d expect).
    • Display Quality. There are three main display modes in InDesign — Fast, Typical, and High Quality (under View > Display Performance). Obviously, the higher the quality, the more InDesign has to think, and the slower it’ll become. If you’re working in Typical and it still seems like one or more images are in high-quality mode, then those images may have display quality overrides applied to them; you can disable those from the Display Performance submenu. InDesign also has other display modes that could potentially slow it down: view > proof color, and view > overprint preview. Normally, on a reasonably fast machine, those shouldn’t slow ID down, though.
    • Preflight. This is a big one. InDesign is constantly looking at your document to see if there are any “preflight errors,” such as overset text. If you have created a custom preflight profile, then it may be looking for lots of different things. Adobe insists that Preflight only works in the background when you’re not working, so it should not slow you down. But there is plenty of anecdotal evidence that preflight can get in the way. I almost always leave it on, but if you’re running into slowdowns, it’s definitely worth turning it off. (You can disable it by double-clicking that little green or red dot in the lower-left corner of the screen, then turning off the On checkbox in the Preflight panel that appears.)
    • Cross references. Probably the most notorious offender, causing slowdowns in InDesign, is the Cross-References feature. This is another example of “Adobe says it shouldn’t slow you down, but people keep coming up with examples that it can.” The biggest problem, as far as I can see, is x-refs that span from one document to another. This doesn’t surprise me because I’ve also seen problems when hyperlinks span across documents. I personally think something is deeply wrong with the way Adobe engineered the whole cross-document thing, and until it’s fixed I tend to think that cross-document referencing and linking should be avoided. Now, that’s not possible for everyone, so here are two other options: First, it sounds as though having all the documents of a book open at the same time can help. That is, just open all the files whenever you’re going to be editing one of them. Annoying, but it should help. A second option is to look at the Cross-References Pro plug-in from dtptools. I don’t know for sure, but it sounds as though their x-ref technology is more robust than what Adobe came up with.
    • Live Screen Drawing. If you get stuttering or slow-downs when you move, resize, or rotate objects, then you should definitely consider setting the Live Screen Drawing pop-up menu to Delayed (in the Interactive pane of the Preferences dialog box). The Delayed option is how it worked in CS4 and earlier: if you click and hold the mouse button for about a second, then it kicks in to “patient user mode” (where you can see the effect take place as you drag. Otherwise, you just get a gray bounding box. I’m fine with the gray bounding box if it means InDesign works faster!
    • Plug-ins (Font Activation). You know I dislike all the font management auto-activation plug-ins and recommend people not install them. (I don’t know who’s fault it is, Adobe’s or the add-on developers, but they’re just buggy as heck.) One person reported that turning off the “auto activate” feature that activates fonts inside graphics helped a lot. But I’d try disabling the whole dang thing and see if that helps, too.
    tallguyGAuthor
    Known Participant
    November 1, 2012

    Those are certainly the main causes. Is this happening in all files, or only isolated files?

    What are the system specs?


    Peter it appears to be an isolated file. However when I save it in another file name the problem still exist. It seems to have started when I made additional page Masters and changed some of the one's that already exist from last years file. I deleted things I did not need from last years catalog and started from scratch. In between I did upgrade to Mountain Lion from Lion.

    I am using

    Apple MacBook Pro "Core i5" 2.4 13" attached to a 27" Acer monitor. 8 GB of RAM 1 TB External HD

    Ken G. Rice
    Community Manager
    Community Manager
    November 1, 2012

    Moved to the InDesign forum. They will be able to help you.

    tallguyGAuthor
    Known Participant
    November 1, 2012

    Where do I go for InDesign forum?

    Ken G. Rice
    Community Manager
    Community Manager
    November 1, 2012

    I have already moved the post.

    Note the breadcrumb trail at the top. Clicking on Discussions will take you to this overall forum, InDesign has several forums some for more specific things such as scripting.

    If you click on Adobe Community you will see several forums listed but can open a drop-down list for all the various product and service forums.