InDesign freezes on export to epub

[jbear-oregon]

I've been fighting with this for several days now.

I have a book of approximately 200 pages with some images. I use two Adobe fonts and various style sheets and character styles (for bold and italics).

I've output the book to PDF with no problem.

When I try to output it to epub, it freezes. The balloon spins endlessly, and the Activity Monitor shows the CPU usage going to 100.3%, and then it says InDesign (not responding).

I have tried the following fixes (not necessarily in this order):

1. Replace images with low-res images.
2. Remove images entirely
3. Remove paragraph styles
4. Remove character styles
5. Remove master pages
6. Remove all fonts other than Arial
7. Delete InDesign preferences.
8. Checked my hard drive for errors.
9. Change the Export settings.
10. Change the Object Export Options.
11. I exported the book, starting with only the title page and going up chapter by chapter. When I arrived at Chapter 6, it stopped. Other chapters beyond that hung up also. I started working with a copy of chapter 6 only. I finally got it to work when I deleted all the text and replaced it with a couple of progress of lorem ipsum.
12. I put the original Word file I was working with into a document, unedited, and it worked.

I'm using a MacBook Pro (2015), OS 10.13.6. Adobe InDesign 13.1. The images are line art and photos, and I've tried both JPG and PNG without success. I placed them inline in the text. The fonts are some I accessed through Typekit. But the same problems persist when I use just Arial.

It seems that there's some problem with the text itself, but I'm at a loss how to troubleshoot it. (Oh, and I also removed the forced line breaks in the Export menu.)

Thanks for your help.

[jbear-oregon]

I meant paragraphs of lorem ipsum.

[Derek Cross]

Reflowable text ePub or Fixed Layout ePub?

[jbear-oregon]

Reflowable.

[jbear-oregon]

Someone suggested that the problem was with the license on TypeKit fonts. I put in new style sheets using Georgia throughout for the sake of the epub file. Still didn't work.

[jbear-oregon · Accepted solution]

I'll reply to this since I spent 2 hours on customer service chat this morning and got the problem solved.

The issue is the Typekit fonts I was using. Their license doesn’t cover epub documents. Instead of showing an error message, however, InDesign helpfully hangs up in an eternal loop with no feedback about the problem. (Oddly, I was able to output a document to epub with a Typekit font, so it's apparently not all of them.)

If this happens to you, change out all the offending fonts for a generic, non-Typekit font. Go to Type -> Find Fonts to see exactly what fonts are active in the document and change them for a nonoffending font. That's it.

[Derek Cross]

Typekit fonts are licenced for epubs.

[benw52584159]

Hi jbear-oregon,

This is Ben from Typekit. Any font that you can sync from Typekit should be licensed for epub. Would you shoot us an email with the fonts you were using here: support@typekit.com? We'll look into this and post an update on this thread.

Cheers,

Benjamin

[susan24364895x3n8]

This solution worked for me.

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

This is probably not the problem, as the quick shot of replies notes.

However... I maintain it's bad practice to spec/embed any fonts in EPUB or Kindle. The list of reasons is long but boils down to two summary points:

1. E-books aren't print books. "Respect the medium."
   
   
2. Fonts cause more problems in e-book formats, both at export and for nearly every individual reader, than the fancy-schmancy is worth. You have twelve to work with in EPUB and Kindle; I've found that to be enough even for complex, attractive work.

—